How2Zilla - How to customise blogger

The template in use across my blog has served me well for several months, but it still doesn't have the feel I would really like.  I started with a standard template then upgraded to a template downloaded from BloggerBuster.  BloggerBuster is a good place to start reading about templates design as well.

Amanda Fazani is great.  Her templates work reliably and my next step from the standard templates was one written by Amanda.   I'd recommend that anybody who wants more choice than the Blogger templates but isn't up to customising templates themselves uses one from Amanda - they are listed on BloggerBuster.

Next  updated to a third party template from elsewhere and it looked gorgeous - but was absolutely full of bugs.  I abandoned it.  Fixing somebody else's template is an uphill struggle.  I then opted for CleanDark from BloggerTricks which formed the basis of the template in use as I write this post (August 2009).  Again it was full of bugs, but not so many that I couldn't fix them.  I've tried other templates from BloggerTricks and there are issues with most if not all of them.  But many third party templates are much worse.  I found another one I liked earlier this week but it reports errors even on the demo site. 

Not all third party templates are broken.  I've found one called showcase that so far seems to be 100% reliable.  People have reported errors with it - but the author has fixed them and republished.  That's something to look for.  Too many template authors are publish and forget.  With care, and a lot of testing, there are some good templates out there but many look good but are going to be grief in practice.

I've reached the stage at which no third party template is ever going to give me exactly what I want, even if I find one without too many bugs.  I tried writing one six months ago and struggled - my CSS wasn't good enough.  Six months on Squido has fixed that.  I wrote the bare bones of one yesterday and I'm now happy I can manage the CSS and the Blogger variables.    I didn't like the design though, so I'm starting from scratch.  Back to a basic template and add everything I want manually.  That really is quicker than trying to customise a template from somebody else.