How to Customize Your Blogger Background {Beautify Your Blog Series}

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Did you notice my new blog design? I wanted to give my blog a new look. I really wanted to hire someone to do it for me but I couldn’t justify spending money. I decided I would figure out a new look on my own. I pretty excited with the results and it was 100% free. It only cost me my time to look for tutorials through Google and Pinterest. I wanted to share what I’ve learned in a little series to help any blog DIYers that want to give their blog a fresh look.

I blog with Blogger so if you use a different system like WordPress or Typepad this post won’t apply.

I figured out how to customize my blog background a while ago. I can’t remember where I got the original instructions but it is surprising how easy to customize blogger templates are as long as you know where to look. I just updated the background to go along with the new color scheme I came up with.

Once you are in your Blogger dashboard, start out by picking Template and then Customize.

An easy template to work with is Simple. Click on it, then pick the first option underneath. It’s ok if you don’t like the background. We are going to change it.

Now click on Background in the top left corner. Under Background Image is a tiny upside down triangle. Go ahead and click on it.

This is where the fun begins! There are tons of backgrounds you can choose from. The first time I looked in here, I spent forever looking through all the fun backgrounds. The one I chose to use is under Patterns. In this category you can change the color of the pattern for most of the backgrounds. Pick Done when you have the background you want.

After you pick a background, if the color can be changed, you pick your color under Main Color Theme. You can play around with the different colors until you find one you like. If you picked a non changeable background you can skip this step or use the colors to pick a theme for your fonts.
You can also change the color and then go back to the Background Image to see how the backgrounds look with the new color

Now you can adjust the width of your blog to show less background and more of your content. Click on Adjust widths in the top left corner. Move the slide bar or type in the width you want. I have my blog set to 1100 and the sidebar set to 300.

Now you can change the font and colors of your text. Click on Advanced in the top left corner. There is a list of everything you can customize starting with Page Text. To the right you pick the font, size and color. For some of the colors I kept the default and the ones I changed I used the Colors From This Template. I made sure to repeat my fonts so my look would be consistent. I picked one font for all of the headers/descriptions and a separate font for the post content.