TypePad® for Dummies®

Chapter 11. Finding and Using a TypePad Theme

In This Chapter

• Understanding core principles of a good blog design

• Using the Design tab

• Using a predesigned TypePad theme or applying your own

• Choosing and ordering your blog's layout and content

• Inserting a custom banner at the top of your blog

• Editing your saved designs

The appearance of your blog makes an instant and important impression on your readers. Ideally, your overall design should be a reflection of your content, complementing and highlighting what you're offering your readers. If you have impeccable content and a brilliant overall blogging concept, but your design is difficult to navigate or hard on a reader's eyes, that reader may be hesitant to stick around.

In this chapter, we tackle the fundamentals of TypePad blog design. We talk about the general rules to consider as you make decisions about your blog's appearance. We also show you how to apply any one of TypePad's numerous themes. Within each theme, you have the freedom to change a wide variety of settings and preferences, including the order and setup of your sidebars and whether you'll use a text or a custom graphic header — we show you how to do both.

After you have a working understanding of these simple design functions, you may be interested to find out how you can tweak your design using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a subject we explain more fully in Chapter 14.

Grasping Basic Design Principles

Before we explain how to apply and adjust your TypePad design, it would ...