Minima templates: A decorative blogger's best friend

Those of you who use Blogger for your blogging pleasure will remember the assortment of templates you had to pick from when you first started blogging. They told you you could change your template later, and they meant it. Good thing, too, since I for one have lots of fun giving my blogs makeovers. (Yes, I'm a blog addict. Don't ask how many I have; I'm not telling, and the answer would probably be obsolete by the time you got it.) Within Blogger, you can change your basic font sizes and colors, and even your basic background color. However, if you want one of those really snazzy looking blogs, such as from The Cutest Blog on the Block, or Shabby Blogs, etc., you really should go with a Minima template. As its name suggests, it is minimally styled, and consequently it easily matches up with whatever great background you've fallen in love with. So, all you decorative bloggers, if you haven't already converted to Minima for all your designer blogging needs, give it a try to day and see if it doesn't change your blog's life. You can even save your blog's existing html before you do it, in case you don't like it.

Amy's 1st Principle of Blogdom: Readability

The origin of the word blog is web plus log, which to me suggests text. Words. Reading. The point? Unless you intend to use your blog exclusively for pictures, it's a good idea to make your blog as readable as possible. Now, I'm not talking about grammar or writing style here. I'm talking about font issues. For example, is there enough contrast between your text color and your background color to make your blog easy to read? Is the text column of your blog open, or are there decorations hanging over into it in colors that make the text hard to see? Speaking of colors, how many colors are you using in your posts, on a per post basis? If you answered more than two, I hope you have a good reason. The point: too much visual distraction of any kind can make even the most beautiful language art invisible. So please, do yourself and your readers a favor and make sure that your blog's decorations don't hide its content. (Unless of course you really want to have a secret message sort of blog . . .)