I just created a completely customized blogger theme for someone blogging about money saving tips. You can view this Money Matters blog by clicking here. My design was based around a vector image of a woman shopping that I purchased from iStock. (As a note, your designs should always be based around one theme or element that ties the design together and sets your design apart from others). The rest of the graphics and design are my own including the signature dollar sign circle graphic.

Other edits and changes I did to this blog are the following:

• Created and added a favicon to match the site
• Created and added post dividers
• Created and added a customized About Me Widget which includes an original graphic that links back to the home page of the site.
• Edited the footer copyright text so that it includes all of my desired links as well as a Contact button that links to an email address.
• Added a couple of advertisement graphics and text to the side bar.
• Added Google AdSense to the bottom of the site (I’m still waiting for it to show up. I might end up having to remove or tweak that part slightly).
• Added pages according to labels
• Removed the Date Header from the posts so that the date only appears with my other meta data icons below the header instead of below and above the header.

This blog was also uploaded manually for those of you using Artisteer and still a little nervous about doing this. Grant it, it is a little tedious, but all I did was the following:

• Exported my design as a folder
• Opened the XML file in Notepad
• Saved all of the images to Picasa
• Edited the XML by changing the image urls to match the actual image locations. (All you need to do is open up the correct images in your web album, right click on an image, and copy and paste the image location to your xml doc.)
• Deleted the current template HTML in blogger (I first saved it just in case).
• Pasted the new edited XML file with the correct image urls into blogger. (Make sure that you select Expand Widget Templates first).
• Saved my new template, and there you go!

A couple of notes on this: Make sure to click on each image individually in your Web Album. If you right click on the thumbnail for the image location, you’ll be getting that smaller sized image instead of the full size that you’ll need. Also, note that you will need to replace the url for each image in two separate places each.

Let me know if you are interested in your own customized Blogger or WordPress theme, and I’d be happy to discuss options and pricing with you.

© 2009 – 2010, Sarah Roberts – Reflecting the Designer. All rights reserved.