4 EASY STEPS ON HOW TO INSTALL A BLOGGER TEMPLATE

Changing the looks of your blogger blog and making it not to look too bloggerish is a nice thing to do. There is a great need and urge to change the looks of our blog and sometimes we just don’t know how to go about it. One pertinent means of changing the looks of your blog is by using a custom template other than the default ones provided by blogger.

Blogger allows the use of third party templates on our blogs and this is really good that they allowed it. You can get a template with full social buttons, navigation menus, breadcrumbs, responsive and SEO friendly templates which can optimize and boost the productivity of your blog. Your template can bring visitors to your site and can also scare visitors away from your site; this is because a template that is not able to adjust itself to the available device used by your reader or a template with much graphic that takes too long to load will also scare them away. This leads us to the “qualities of a good template”

1. Responsiveness: a good template must be able to adjust itself to fit the the current device through which your blog is accessed without disrupting the contents. Choosing a template that will display the desktop version on a mobile phone is not ideal and for this reason, avoid using a non responsive template, choose a template that will adjust to a mobile device without disrupting the layout of your contents.
2. Minimal graphics: displaying some graphics on your blog helps draw the attention of your visitors, it makes your blog more fun but when it gets excess, it becomes a huge problem. A blog with too much graphics will take much time to load and will also consume much data connection; a situation in which your blog requires 1mb of data just to load a single page will bring down your traffic. Choose a minimal graphics template.
3. Easy navigation: your template should be able to make your visitor get to the top of your page with just one click rather than having to scroll up or down by themselves. Choose a template with navigation buttons and breadcrumbs placed at strategic positions on your blog.
4. SEO-friendly: your template should be able to also contribute a quota to your search engine optimization; there are some templates that are designed to display your post title before your blog title and also provide spaces for the entry of blog descriptions and keywords which is a very vital SEO trick. When choosing, choose wisely.

Let’s see the simple steps on how to successfully upload your template to your blog.

STEP 1: download your new template to your computer hard drive, usually, it is often a zip file so you need to extract it using winRar or like. After extracting your template, look for the XML file and copy it to your desktop for ease of retrieval.

STEP 2: login to your blogger account and on the dashboard, select the blog you want to upload the template (that is if you have more than 1 blog).

STEP 3: click on template >>backup/restore and on the dialog box that appears, click on “download full template” to download your current template so that in case you encounter any problem while uploading the new one, you can revert to the old one by following the same step as to upload a new one.

STEP 4: browse your PC and locate your XML file which I supposed you placed on your desktop; after locating it on your desktop, click on upload and wait for it to upload. You should get a success message similar to that on this image, and then you can go ahead and customize your template by adding widgets and rearranging them to fit your taste. Enjoy!