Create Your Own Photo Blog

Chapter 6. THE DESIGN STUDIO: SKINS AND CUSTOMIZING

If you've read Chapters 4 and 5, you should have a good feel for the nuts and bolts that hold your blog together, but the best way to learn about how your blog works is to use it. By applying your chosen skin to your blog and setting up your menus and blog elements, you become more familiar and comfortable with the code and the Movable Type system.

You may be tempted to skip this chapter if you are not using the supplied templates or the Movable Type system, but I urge you not to. It contains critical information about such things as building About and Links pages and what works well or not in sidebars.

Although you can use the supplied templates out of the box or simply apply a new skin on top and use them the way they are, you can also use them as a jumping-off point for your own design ideas. As you learned in Chapters 1 and 2, you can do many things with a little bit of CSS and a sprinkling of HTML. Don't be afraid of them. If you make a change you don't like, you simply change it back.

Making Interesting Pages

Ablog contains not only entries, which have already been discussed, but also other pages that you create to share information with users. There are many types of pages that you can add to your blog that will make it more appealing to readers. People love to poke around on websites and see what nuggets the blogger has tucked ...