Kicking off my small business ideas.
To get my business ideas off the ground, I will need to learn some new technologies that will allow me to create a presence on the internet. Right now, I am learning to walk before I run. I’ve discovered that every day, there’s always something to absorb from cyberspace that will help shape my site’s goals. Granted I’m a novice, but I’m hoping to ramp up on my blog design in a few days or weeks. I wish I had a mentor who could teach me some of these things one-on-one, but for now, I must be content with the vast resources of the web to help me with my modest blog design attempts. This will be a work in progress for a good long time! I have realized a few things I thought I’d share. If you are a noob at this, you may want to keep these in mind:
- you will never be content with your initial blog template
- your initial attempts at configuring your layouts will fail miserably and will, unfortunately, suck
- you will be frustrated and will be resigned to hair ripping moments
- you will need to save your templates often
- you will need some basic editing tools to help you
- you will want to defer adding too many custom doodads to your site until after you’ve settled on a basic layout
- you will appreciate web designers a hell of a lot more than you did before
- you will no longer be stunned by the stratospheric fees web designers charge
…and this coming from a server-side J2EE/database engineer.
Hopefully, this experience will mark the start of a productive journey towards creating an online home business and a way out of cubicle employment somewhere down the line!














I figured out the layout finally. I was trying to increase the layout from 2 column to 3 column. I just had to increase the image widths for the header, body and footer. Then I had to readjust the column widths and voila! It worked. I had to make sure that the blogger stylesheets were located afer my template stylesheets as well. Some great lessons learned.
Hi! It’s always fun to tweak and experiment with templates. You might consider trying Wordpress on your own domain in the future.
Anyway, one step at a time…
Welcome to the blogging world Finnegan Lane!
I have never tweaked with templates but it sounds like a great way to spruce up a blog. If I can only find the time. Thanks for the tips.