I got bored with my blog design at Oregongirl82. So I changed it. And changed it again. And again. And messed it up horribly and lost some of my links and coding and oy … it was a mess. Thankfully I had posted about the Label Cloud, so I could replace that element at least, but the rest … I couldn’t remember all of them, and I couldn’t remember all of the design sites I’d been looking at when I created any of the designs, and egad, I was frustrated! And I still wasn’t happy with the design, either.
So, before I kept adjusting the design, I decided to write a couple of posts. One is a list of links to all my favorite blogs, so if I manage to erase that section again, at least I’ll have them recorded somewhere. I also mentioned why I like each of them, both for my own personal reference and for those of you that might be interested in checking them out too 
You can check it out on the Oregongirl82 blog, it’s called My Favorite Fellow Bloggers.
The second post is this one, where I’m going to talk about some of my favorite sites for design, and the design layouts I like best, and such. So I can refer to this post the next time I feel the itch to reorganize
One site that I’ve found is great for customizing your blog site is PsycHo. You can totally customize the colors, the font, etc, without knowing any html at all. My only complaint is that it’s designed for use with Classic Blogger, not the new Blogger templates, so you can’t incorporate widgets with it. So, once I used the PsycHo platform a few times and familiarized myself with the HTML, I found another site that did work with new Blogger and just used things I’d learned from PsycHo to customize my site further.
For blogs that DO work correctly with the new Blogger template, I like what I’ve seen on FinalSense.com. There’s a variety of both 2-column and 3-column choices, in such categories as animals, art, cars, ships & airplanes, music & dance, nature, sports, religion, etc.
There’s not much in the way of customization here, but there are some beautiful images. They’re clean and simple, too. Two of my favorites are these templates, one for a photo blog and one with a butterfly. Sadly, I’m too independent to settle for something that I can’t customize more, something that has a good chance of being another person’s template too, so I had to keep searching.
Oddly enough, for the time being I ended up going back to the Blogger-provided templates, and then giving them my own touch. I choose the style called “Thisaway Green” and then set out to experiment. First, as I mentioned before, I added the Blogger Cloud back in. Next, under the “Templates” tab, I adjusted the Fonts and Colors more to my liking. I prefer Trebuchet to Arial, and I added a bit of blue as the sidebar title color and the data color for contrast. And of course, I had include some butterflies!
To do this, I hunted around in the HTML code until I found the images I wanted to replace (they were originally just arrows). I had uploaded the images I wanted to use into my Picasa Album, so all I had to do was change the image sources for each. I put one large butterfly with flowers behind next to the blog title, and small outlined butterflies as bullet points next to each section in the sidebar.
And voilà, I have a design that I am slightly happier with, and even better, a record here of how I did it. Hopefully over the next few months I’ll learn even more about HTML and be able to further customize my look, and I’ll write another post then, but for now, I’ll survive
