My Blog = My Life: templates

When you start any Blogger blog, it automatically installs a navigation bar or banner running across the top of the screen with the links: "Follow," "Share," "Report Abuse," and "Next Blog." This is called the "navbar" and is a real eye sore to most visitors. The good news is, removing the navigation bar in Blogger is easy.

"But, wait? Don't I want those links?" you may ask... Not generally. The only two links that are really useful to you are first the "Follow" link, but you took care of that in a much sexier way when you installed your classy and sexy follow buttons, right? And the "Share" link, but there are much better ways to setup sharing on your blog (which I'll discuss soon).

The "Next Blog" link takes visitors away from your blog. The "Report Abuse" button let's people report your blog to Google which could lead to Google taking action against you (and, subsequently also leaves internet trolls the easy opportunity to try and sabotage you, though this isn't generally a problem).


But more than anything, it's amateurish and ugly. It screams "I have an out-of-the-box Blogger blog!" So, my advice is to ditch it. Here's how you do it (please note that this doesn't work in the old version of blogger, but you can still do it. Check out this page for more info on that. Be sure to scroll down to the section about Classic Blogger templates).
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I'm going to put on my marketing hat today, and let's talk about blog templates for a moment. As I'm sure you are aware, there are a lot of generic and purchasable templates available for your blog. So, which one should you choose? And, does it really make a difference?

The answer is two-fold. If you have a blog for the sole purpose of writing your thoughts out, and you don't care if new people find you and follow you, and your family and friends will come read no matter what it looks like, then in all truth it doesn't matter at all. Pick something that makes you feel good and start typing!
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