You will find the template features of your blog under the Layout tab of your dashboard. The tabs under Layout are:
- Page Elements - this allows you to easily include additional features in your blogs header, sidebar and footer areas. Blogger has a good range of add-ins which it calls page elements. You may wish to include features from external sites, in which case you are provided with the code to add to your template. This is normally done by copying and posting the code into a new HTML/JavaScript Page Element.
- Fonts and Colors - This allows for some basic styling of your blogs font and background colors.
- Edit HTML - Here you will find all the coding for your template. Edit xml would have been a more appropriate title for it as these are xml rather than html templates. Before you do any editing it is wise to download a copy of your current template using the download function at the top of the edit html screen. You can then restore this if anything goes wrong or you just change your mind.
The main reasons you may want to edit this template are: - To alter your blogs styling over and above what you can do in the Fonts and Colors section.
- To change your template to one that is not included in the Pick New Template Tab. i.e. a template you download from another site or one you create yourself.
- To make alterations to your existing template, add new features that cannot be added via Page Elements or to add the ability to add more page elements.
- Pick New Template - to change your template to one of the Blogger default templates.
You will see the option to 'revert to Classic Template' at the bottom of the Edit HTML tab. All new blogspot hosted blogs are based on an xml templating system. Prior to this they were html based and these are now called Classic Templates. If you want to install a new template from a third party site ensure you are using the correct sort. Classic templates are still used by some blogspot bloggers and they must be used if you want to host your blog on your own server. This old system does not, among other things, have the Page Elements feature and changes have to be made by editing your html.
