Making more Professional Blogger Blogs

Today I am giving you a great tips and tricks to make your blogger blog more professional than before.  One of the first things you'll have to do is decide which blogging application you want to use. There are a ton of options, ranging from the incredibly simple (LiveJournal), to the infinitely customizable (WordPress). But one of the easiest blogging clients around is Google's Blogger.

Blogger is not as easy to customize as WordPress, but Blogger's simplicity also makes the process of setting up a blog a lot less daunting. You can literally start blogging within minutes of signing up for a Blogger account.
Google will also host your blog for free, which means you don't need to pay for domain registration or web hosting. WordPress does also offer free hosting, but WordPress doesn't allow free account holders to include advertising, Right? But Blogger does.

But while Google offers a handful of widgets for customizing your blog, if you really want to make your web site your own, you're going to have to get your hands dirty editing your blog template and adding some HTML and JavaScript code. Fortunately, you don't have to know much about HTML or CSS to implement the tweaks in this guide. As long as you're handy with the copy and paste keys, you should be all set. So let's get started, Right Now;)

Back up your work

Before you start editing your template, it's probably a good idea to save a backup.

1. 
   Enter Blogger's Layout menu
   
2. 
   Select the "Edit HTML" tab
   
   
3. 
   Click the button that says "Download Full Template"Save this XML file somewhere you won't lose it. You can use it to restore your old template if things go horribly wrong.
   
   

While we're talking about backup, now is as good a time as any to mention two services that will let you create regular backups of all the content on your blog. BlogBackupOnline is an online service that will scan your site once a day and save a copy of every blog post and image. Free account holders can save up to 5MB, which should be enough for a few hundred blog posts, while more advanced users can pay for additional storage. If you'd rather download and save your data to your desktop, you might want to check out Blogger Backup, a desktop application for Windows.

Eliminate the navigational toolbar

One thing that sets Blogger apart from many other blogging services is the toolbar that is displayed at the top of most blogs hosted on Blogger. Some uses like this toolbar as it includes a site search feature and it lets users find random blogs in StumbleUpon-like fashion by clicking the "Next Blog" button. So here's a tricks how to hide it.

* Navigate to the Edit HTML tab in the Layout menu.
* Enter the following text pretty much anywhere in your template (above ]]> tag. To find that tag your can press CTRL+F) and then click "Save Template":

#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none;
} 

Then refresh your blog, the Navbar should be invisible.

Change your label list into a tag cloud 
Blogger lets you add labels (the rest of the world calls these tags) to your posts. And you can display a list of labels in your blog sidebar. But if you like to tag liberally, after a few months of blogging, there's a good chance your list of labels will be about a mile long. One solution is to replace your label list with a label cloud. And to take this action follow the tricks:

* Log on to blogger>> Layout >> Add a Gadget >> Labels>> Click the option Cloud instead of list. See the following screenshot:

Add a contact box page

You can add a contact box using a service like Emailme Form. Email me From presents you with some HTML that you can paste into a blog post to bring up a contact box. Visitors can send you an email message without every seeing your actual email address, which helps cut down on your inbox. See the below screen shot:

Above is my Contact Me form. To create this types of form, I have used the tricks from My Blogger Tricks.

Place ads and other content between posts

Google makes it extraordinarily easy to place Google AdSense advertisements in between posts. Just go to the Layout menu and click the "Edit" button in the "Blog Posts" box and check the "Show Ads Between Posts" box. But what if you want to show ads from another network or some other content in between posts on yourou main page?

In order to do that, you need to go back into your template and check the "Expand Widget Templates" box. Now find the line that reads "

" If you add the HTML code for your ad or other content here, it should pop up in between each post on the main page.

If you get an error message, it's possible that Blogger doesn't like the HTML code, but you can probably solve this problem by parsing your code and translating it into a format Blogger will recognize. Fortunately, there's no need to do this by hand. You can use the Parse HTML tool provided by BlogCrowds. Just copy and paste the code you get from your advertising network into the tool and it will spit out a version of the code that should fit comfortably into your Blogger template. And then see this screenshot:

You can see demo on my blog.

Choose a new template

 You can use the tools above to change the look and feel of the sidebars. And you can use Blogger's Fonts and Colors editor to change the basic look and feel of your chosen template. But if you're not happy with the templates Google provides, there are hundreds if not thousands of other templates available for free. These third party templates are often more attractive than the default templates, and help keep your readers from realizing they're visiting a Google hosted blog. Oh, and Google doesn't offer three column templates.

If you know what you're doing, it's not hard to modify these templates to do things like move the sidebar from the right side of the page to the left, or change the images atop the page. Here are a few sites where you can find some excellent templates:

• Blogger Buster
  
  
• FinalSense
  
  
• Blogger Templates
  
  
• Blogspot Templates
  
  
• Gecko & Fly
  
  
• Mashable: 50 Beautiful Blogger Templates
  
  
• Our Blog Templates
  
  

  I have used the template Revolution Chruch. If you like this template click here to download. For details visit: Bloganol

Keep in mind that changing templates will most likely cause issues with your widget layout. So it's best to find a good template before you start designing your blog, or while you're still experimenting with your overall layout.


Adding Fav Icon
Adding FavIcon is great way to make blog professional. For those who don't know what Favicon is 'Favicon is a small icon(image) displayed at the beginning of the address bar of the browser.It is also called Favourite Icon,Pageicon and urlicon.

The main advantage of creating and using favicon is ,it makes it easy to find your blog or site when someone favourited or bookmarked your site/blog among several other sites. You can see my cool favicon in my blog:)

I used this tricks from Blogger Tricks.

Register a domain name

Now you know how to make your blog pretty, but there's one more ugly spot you might want to address. The URL bar. Myblog.blogspot.com just never seems quite as professional as myblog.com. Fortunately, you can register a domain name for just a few bucks per year, and Google will continue to handle all of your hosting fees.

Google makes it easy to publish your blog to a custom domain name. Just click the "Settings" tab in the Blogger Dashboard, and then click on "Publishing." Next, click the link that says "Custom Domain," and you can either purchase a domain from GoDaddy or enter the name of a domain you have already registered.

Now you can publish your blog to a custom domain for $10 per year or less. Next time your friends start telling you how much cooler WordPress is, throw that in their face.

If you know more tricks to make a great professional blog, Freely you can share with me:) And let me see your cool professional blog;)