This past week I have been focused on customizing my Blogger Template, and I have to admit, I was shocked to find just HOW much information is available. Blogger can be tweaked to your own personal tastes and needs regardless of what it is you want it to do or how you want your site to appear.

One requirement to website development is having a non-production site that allows you to test changes without disturbing your “live” site. Although you can’t necessarily do this within your current blog, you can quickly and easily create a test blog that is private! In addition to making private test site, you want to make sure it isn’t being crawled by search engines, listed under your Blogger profile (but still visible to you in your Dashboard), and… well, let’s just say BloggerBuster did a great job of covering this from top to bottom and I highly recommend you take a look if you are planning a site overhaul.

One seemly apparent drawback to Blogger templates (provided by Blogger) is that they are ALL 2 column templates. The truth is, Blogger is so customizable that this isn’t necessarily a problem. You can find different Blogger templates in a variety of places and end up with a very non-Blogger-like site. You can even remove, or rather, hide the “Navbar” (that’s the bar across the top Blogger shows on your site by default) with 5 simple lines of code. I have turned mine on and off but I think I’m going to keep it since it doesn’t seem to interfere with my design.

As far as my personal choice for a template, I really liked the Minima Template for it’s simplicity in design, but wanted it to be 3 columns. I tried downloading versions that other people had created and found that they had tweaked too much and it was less like Minima than I wanted. I was then happy to find amazingly simple instructions on how to convert the template myself! To change Minima from 2 columns to 3, just follow some simple instructions from Tips for New Bloggers.

There are probably hundreds of Blogger resources available, but BloggerBuster and Tips for New Bloggers together truly make up your Swiss Army knife of Blogger goodness. Between the two of them, I have plenty of information to keep me busy improving my site for a long time to come.