How to Install a Blogger Template

Setting up a blog can be fun and scary at the same time. It can show you how indecisive you are and sometimes how little you know about a subject (i.e. coding).  This is something that I ran into when I first had the idea to create my first blog. I had no idea what I was doing, everyone out there was recommending a self-hosted WordPress site, but I just didn’t want to spend the cash just yet.

Honestly, I was also a little intimidated by the way people talked about self-hosted WordPress sites. It made them seem like so much work and usually having to pay someone. But this was also years ago. Since then templates have changed drastically and things have gotten easier.

But we’re not here to talk about WordPress, we’re here to get you started and on your way to having a blog on Blogger.

So the first thing that you need to do is figure out what you want to blog about. This is important because it can help determine how you set up your blog and what it will look like.  You can use my blog post HERE to help you find your niche and figure out what in the world to blog about.

Once you know what you want to blog about, you need a template. Unless you are super good at coding and can write your own… For the rest of us, I have listed off a few websites below that have Blogger themes for free.

Where to Find Templates

www.soratemplates.com has many free templates, but they do offer paid plans on some of the templates if you want support in setting it up.

www.mybloggerthemes.com  has all of the same templates as Sora Templates and more. This is so far the most comprehensive database for templates that I have found.

www.btempaltes.com this is great if you want a more simple blog theme, similar to the ones that you find on Blogger itself. They have a lot of different backgrounds and graphics to spruce up your blog.

Once you have found the template that you love, or that you can deal with, download the zip file and extract the files to a folder on your computer. I like to create a separate folder for each theme I download so everything stays together.

Uploading your New Template to Blogger

Now it’s time to log into Blogger. Log in and follow the prompts to create you website. This will be the starting place for everything. Don’t worry about which template to choose, we will be changing that in a minute. Just make sure that you get the name that you want. You can change the domain later too, but I find it easiest to start with the one that you want.

When you are in the main page, click on Theme on the left hand side. Then you will want to click on Edit HTML.

You will then go into the template that you downloaded, click on the template (make sure it opens in WordPad or Notepad or some word document).  Open the Free Version of the template and copy all of the file to your clipboard (CTRL+C).

Then go back into Blogger and you will see this page if you clicked on Edit HTML. If not, Click on it now and see this page. I know it looks scary, but we won’t be here long. Highlight all of the text in the box and then paste what you copied from your Word file in this box.  (CTRL+A to highlight all and then CRTL+V to paste).

Click on Save Theme, the orange button up top. And now you may leave the scary page. You have successfully changed your template.

To edit this template, go to Layout and make sure you refresh the page to load your new template parts into this area. This is where all you editing will happen, You can add parts and pieces from here without having to go into the code, unless you want to of course.

Once you are done editing in this area, your blog will just need posts to be ready to go.

**Please be aware that some parts of the blog template may not work properly until a certain number of posts have been published.**

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