Customising Blogger Widgets
Make Your Blog Easy to Use
By Phoebe Montague of Lady Melbourne
Following on from my last post Beauty and the Beast: Making your blog functional, here are some tips on how best to utilise your Blogger widgets to get the most out of your blog.
You should by now have a nice, clean template set up to start blogging with, let’s hope you don’t have a bright yellow back ground or mismatched fonts!
The point of that post was about not cluttering your blog with useless widgets. So what makes a widget essential?
Profile
We’re a curious bunch us humans and it may surprise you to know that the profile pages on blogs are the most frequently viewed. You can add your profile with picture to your blog by simply editing your profile from your dashboard as seen below.
Social Media Share Tools
Getting people to subscribe or book mark your blog can increase traffic and add value to your blog.
Adding something like the ‘Sociable’ widget can make it easy for your readers to bookmark and share content from your blog in one simple application.
Twitter Feed
Most of us are on Twitter, and chances are that if you aren’t, your readers are! Blogger offers many different Twitter widgets, as does Twitter itself. It’s up to you what you decide to choose, here I have shown you how to install a Twitter feed using Blogger.
Blog roll
Linking to other blogs is crucial for a couple of reasons. Firstly it’s a way to establish connections in the blogging community and show support for other bloggers. It will also help establish for your readers the theme of your blog, and similar websites to yours that they can reference.
Adding a blog roll or links list is one of the easiest gadgets you can use to improve your blog.
Of course, there are endless gadgets and widgets you can use, and the beauty of blogging is that you can create something entirely unique and individual.
Using these four widgets in Blogger is a great start however to and easy to use and functional blog.
If you have a topic you would like covered, simply leave a comment and I’ll do my best to cover it off.
Happy Blogging!
Lady Melbourne
You can check out Lady Melbourne’s blog at www.ladymelbourne.com.au
November 18th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Nice work there Phoebes :)
November 19th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Hi Lady Melbourne,
I went here just as you said, great post! thanks again for your help.
love Jenn
November 21st, 2009 at 8:16 am
I think there’s a lot of blogger users who need tutes like this one ;)
Maybe cover something about the best way to set up the comments box? I really don’t like it when I have to sign in to comment, I would rather just comment with name/url on a blogger blog – not everyone is a blogger user!
November 21st, 2009 at 10:36 am
cool. will have to have a looksie into these options :-)
November 21st, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Thanks for these tips!! I’ve only had my blog for about 6 months and I’m trying desperately to iron out the kinks!
November 22nd, 2009 at 9:34 am
Oh man, I just realised that you don’t allow name/url comments on your blog. I used my google/blogger id, but what I don’t like about that is that it doesn’t then link to my blog.
I’m not good on openid and understanding how all that works – maybe that’s a topic for the future?
November 23rd, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Hey Fiona, great feedback you have here, I think you may have just provided me with this weeks topic!
If you have a blogger ID I don’t know why your name as it appears in the comment section wouldn’t be the link to your profile page? Thats generally how Blogger works, it doesn’t take you directly to the homepage but the profile page. You need to make sure that you have selected that your blog is visible through your Blogger profile as well. That is a Blogger feature as well, not something that I have chosen on my blog- it’s across the board.
But I will try and cover it off in another post and thank you!
LM
December 1st, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Nice tips, Phoeb.
Looks like lots of people are still using Blogger to blog :) I hope my guest post here (coming soon) doesn’t invite too much “controversy” as I’ll be biasly telling how great WordPress is compared to Blogger lol
December 4th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
great post. thanks again for your tips
April 9th, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Fab advice – i’m just starting up a blog and have a couple of questions if thats ok?
Firstly – i love your title/header thingy at Lady Melbourne, its totally gorgeous! How would i go about or where would i go to to get one of my own?
Secondly, i see people on fashion blogs ‘quoting’ pics from other blogs. Whats the etiquette there? Do you need to get permission first? Don’t want to tick anyone off on my first foray into the blogging world!
Thanks for all the hard work :)