The Single Parent Finally Talks: Blogger Template Improvements

Finally, I’ve just finished adding not so obvious changes on my personal blog. As some of you may have noticed, I own another personal blog related to my single parenting experience. I was working on that blog layout for two days. That’s a long time to do such modifications on a template, but I was working on the blogger server all time.

Anyway, these are the visible changes:

• page navigation: The template had a built-in page navigation that’s easy for any blogspot blogger to add more pages. I have to make some new pre-dated posts so that they could function as the pages of that blog. You should be able to see a more descriptive “about me” page, and I thought of putting up a separate page for a small “shop” as well.
  • photos: Remember the Slide.com widget that I put earlier? That’s now gone – I’ve decided to put that on a separate page. That would speed up the loading time of the home page. I also changed that one to a bigger widget.
  • contact me: You can now send me emails through by using that contact form.
  • shop: I suddenly got this idea of putting a series of affiliate products on another page. I think it is a neat idea.
  • FAQ and about me: I wrote a new about me page for the benefit of those new readers who like to know me the fast way. I decided to include that FAQ page – one of the most commented posts in that blog.
• advertisements: I got ads installed at selected section of the blog. There’s an ad right below the main blog title, as well as the sidebar. There’s also an in between the end of the post and the comments and also before the comment form.
• favicon: I got that working before, then lost it and now I got that fixed.
• feeds: This was a pleasing surprise for me – my feed reader subscription jumped up to 60 readers from just merely 12 readers.  I just made sure that I am using the provided Feedburner feed link for that single parenting blog.
• read more: I decided to put a “continue reading” link to cut down long posts. This allows me put two more recent posts, so that the latest five posts are shown on the homepage. I will not be putting “continue reading link on sponsored reviews and short posts.
• SEO: Some may have noticed that I had done some on-page SEO. I hope to attract some search engine traffic. PinoyCopyWriter’s How to do Basic Keyword Research using Google Keyword Tool was one of the helpful resources I used to carve that blog to those keywords.
• invisible background: If you look very closely, I had removed the background from Entrecard, the stats and some other ads.
• recent posts: I also got that recent posts working fine just below the blog. I hope you like that one.
• quick update: I was hoping that the widget is easy to put up, but it was not.  It had no background when I first added the widget. I had to play with the CSS codes to get the effect that I was looking for.

There are also some non-visible changes that I had made on the blog. I believe that the quickedit tool that accompanies every blogger gadget leaks pagerank juice to blogger, so I decided to remove all of that.

Those who dressed up their blogspot blogs with the same template would surely appreciate the effort that I put into modifying this template. It is not really easy work.

Anyway, I just hope you like the new changes to this blog’s layout. The next thing that I need to do is to work on this blog. That experience helped me a lot in leveling up my freelance skills. For the meantime feel free to leave comments.

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