Working with Layout of your Blog | Blogger Basics

Creating amazing blog posts and informative pages won’t help your blog get visitors attention unless its layout is neatly designed and sorted out. If there are no visitor attracting elements on the page, there is no question of managing comments. If there is no interaction on the blog, there would be no question of working with traffic stats.

My point is that having a perfect layout can only help visitor or reader of your blog navigate through the content on the page easily and can respond to the views you have written.

Elements in the blogger layout are called gadgets. You can add gadgets that are already existed or your own. You can simply change their position by dragging them over the layout.



The layout of the blog is classified into,

• Header
• Body
• Sidebar(s)
• Footer

Header

Header, as the name suggests, positions at the top of the page as you can see in the following screenshot. The header contains details like blog title & description, navigation menu, and breadcrumbs, etc.

The other custom elements can also be added to the header part for the website in the form of gadgets. The must-have elements in the header space of an ideal blog are title & description and navigation menu. All other elements are optional.

Body

Body of the webpage is where your articles(blog posts) appear. In other words, this is the space for your articles to be shown. The width of the article space depends on the whole width of the outer wrapper. The article space should adjust along with the width of the sidebar(s) or else the layout would look like overlapped one another.

Outer wrapper! sounds new?

Outer wrapper is the total width of the blog considered in designing the layout. All the elements on the page would be positioned within the outer wrapper. In other words, it is a container that holds all the elements of a layout.

Sidebar

Sidebar, as the name, suggests positions at either of the left or right side of the wrapper. It is where the gadgets appear at most. You may have one or two sidebars or even more than two in some cases.



In fact, placing the right gadgets in sidebar increases the user interaction with the blog. For example, placing a ‘popular posts’ gadget in the sidebar would get visitor’s attention over the top trending posts of your blog.

When it comes to advertising sidebars are best fit for ad units to get visitors attention. Ad spaces in the top positions of sidebars have more demand than the lower ones.

Footer

Footer, also as the name suggests positions at the bottom of the website. It is one of the crucial elements of the website. A footer is generally used for placing the service, download and attribution links.



For example, take a look at the screenshot of the footer of Microsoft site.



Also scroll down to the bottom to see the footer of our website, amfastech.com.

Each and every gadget on any part of the layout can only be added if there is a possibility of adding it. To code a layout design of your website, you should have a better idea of web programming. As this tutorial is designed for starters, I would suggest you play with the layout now and we’ll see about coding a custom layout in advanced tutorials.

Read all blogger basics tutorials now.