Blogger and Wordpress lets you choose from a variety of skins templates – templates with one column, 2 column and 3 columns. 3 columns are very useful when you have to maximize your content besides earning from your blog i.e. when you have more contents to put in your blog.
If you are still not happy with the skins and would like to have something different, then you can download the skin you want from the sites listed below. Though there are many different sites to let you download free templates for blogs absolutely free, I personally recommend the following sites for your review:
Where to download from?
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/29-beautiful-blogger-templates/
This provides 29 really neat and cool design templates for you to download.
(See emire template below for an example)
http://designs.bloggerbuster.com/search/label/three%20column
Some Web 2.0 enabled templates, 2-3 column templates, classic templates and a variety of different templates for you to choose from.
(See gourmet template below for an example)
http://www.finalsense.com/services/blog_templates/
A very good collection of template themes for both new and old blogger with fixed background, classic templates, 2-3 column templates for download, arranged neatly in different categories.
(Check butterfly template for an example)
http://www.pyzam.com/bloggertemplates/
A wonderful set of designer templates and 2-3 column templates for blogger.
(Check vintage flower template for an example)
http://www.idwebtemplate.com/category/template-categories/
Some neat templates that are also adsense optimized.
(Check Woman-auto-insurance template for an example)
How to use these templates in your blog?
1. For Wordpress:
Download the theme archive and extract the files. You need to preserve the directory structure in the archive when extracting these files. Using an FTP client to access your host web server, create a directory to contain your theme in the wp-content/themes directory provided by WordPress. For example, a theme named "ABCtheme" should be in wp-content/themes/ABCtheme.
Upload the theme files to the new directory on your host server.
To select the active theme for your site: Log in to the WordPress Administration Panel.Select the "Presentation" sub panel.From the "Select" column in the table, click on "Select" for the theme you wish to activate.To view the new theme in action, click "View Site" at the top of the Panel's screen.Your theme should immediately become active.
2. For Blogger
The sites display the HTML code of the selected theme for you. CTRL+A to copy all the contents of the code and CTRL+V to paste it to a notepad.
Now log into your blogger account, go to Dashboard, go to the “Layout” section of the selected blog and click on “Edit HTML” button. It is very important that you take a backup of your old HTML code (your previous blog layout) and copy it to another notepad. After taking a backup of your old code, delete the existing HTML code and paste the new code from the first notepad (you new template design layout).
Click on “Preview” to view how the new template looks like. If you are happy with it, go ahead and “Save template”.
Point to remember here is that old blogger templates might not be compatible with the new blogger layout and hence on “Preview” you might get an error that your file could not be parsed since it is not well formed.
Don’t worry about your page elements on copying the new HTML code. First, you already have the backup and secondly, blogger preserves page elements in the new blogger theme.
Note: All of the above links also contain template designs that are adsense optimized!
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