How to Change your Background

Okay. Ready for this super easy "How to Change your Blog Background" tutorial? Let's Do it.

Blogger's has a sweet Template Designer that eliminates the need to play around with that messy HTML code! It helps you change lots of options on your blog such as font colors, links, borders, templates, AND backgrounds!

This is especially nice if you want to create your own background from Digital Scrapbooking kits in Photoshop or another editing program and upload them directly through blogger. Or, you could just as easily choose any photo from your computer or on the web.

Here's how to change your blog's background:

1. From your blogger Dashboard click on "Design".

2. You should be taken to the "Page Elements" page under the "Design" tab. There's this nifty little "Template Designer" button. Click on it.

3. In the left column click on "Background" and next to the background image is a little down arrow. Click on that too.

4. A window pops up that looks like this. Click on "Upload Image" at the top left. Then you can "Browse" through your files to find an image for your background. They recommend 1800x1600 pixels.

I made my background image at 1600x1100 px/in and it ended up being too big and gets cut off on the bottom of the screen. Then I figured out that my computer monitor has a resolution of 1600x900, but in my browser window I have all the toolbars on top and bottom so the actual height that I can see is probably only about 675px. so that's why I can't see the whole background.


*TIP- If you are designing your own background from scratch*

Depending on other people's screen resolutions they might see more or less of the background than you can. A helpful tip  *You should try designing your website for your audience. But you might not know what type of screen resolutions your visitors have if you don't have analytics set up for your site..... That's okay. I have found that 1280x1024 and 1024x768 seems to be the most common sizes and I'll show you how to optimize your design for all screen types by tiling your image. So that, for instance, even I can see your design across my entire screen at 1600px wide.

Anyways, back to the tutorial.....

5. After your image has uploaded, click on it so it is highlighted in orange and hit "Done".

Now you should see this:

6.  Click on the drop down arrow next to "Alignment". Select the top middle button (which will pull your background up to the top of the window and center it).

7. Then click on the next drop down arrow below, mine says "Don't tile", I'm not sure if this is the default so yours might say something else.

Okay here's where it will matter what screen size other people have and how much of your background they will be able to see.

I think the best solution is to "Tile" your image. This means that your image will repeat on the sides and bottom of your website, which works out nicely if someone has a larger screen than your background image.  *If you choose "Don't tile" then other people with larger screen resolutions than your photo will see white space (mine is gray space) around your background image. Which doesn't look very pretty and appealing.   ;-)

Here's a few examples:

Tile Vertically *notice the gray areas to the sides where it is not tiled

Tile Horizontally *notice the bottom is gray, (the top is not because we aligned our image to the top).

Completely tiled (looks like 6 of the same picture)

"Don't Tile" option

Now keep in mind that in the above examples I have my browser zoomed way way out to see so much of the background.

8. Now this is a personal preference, but I like a "static" background, which means it doesn't move when you scroll up and down, so I leave "Scroll with page" unchecked.  But if your background has a nice repetitive style you might want to experiment with it. On the other hand, if your background is busy it might distract too much from your content with so much going on.

Play around with that for a second and decide which way you like best.

Almost done...........

9. Last thing to do is make our blog transparent so your background shows through. In the left column click on "Advanced", then "Backgrounds" in the second column.

 

Now Change all the color settings to "transparent".

**On a side note, if your background image is dark, or too busy and distracting you might want to leave these settings alone, but this is where you could change their color if you wanted.

 

10. Just click on "Apply to Blog" in the upper right hand corner to save your changes.

Yay! You're done! Good Job!  Now Click on "back to blogger" and it will take you back to your "page elements" tab. From there just click on "View Blog".

I hope everything worked for you and this tutorial was helpful, not confusing! :-) Aren't you so excited now that you can change your blog background as often as you like? I SURE AM!

Do you like?

So, I just learned how to change my blog's background, header, font, and font colors!!

It's about time too! I've been playing around with Photoshop long enough now to know a thing or two about Digital layouts..... which is exactly what I used for my background and header!!!

Do you want to know how I did it?? Guess what, it's SO easy! And tomorrow I'm gonna give you a walk through on how to do it.

BTW, the picture of my family in the Header is from 1 1/2 years ago, we all look a little different now.... and I am a brunette not blond anymore. :-)

Party Planner and Event Designer- Handouts

So now that I've decided to give this party planning idea a go, I made up these hand-outs in Photoshop of my previous parties to give to the ladies I threw the parties for so that they can hand them out whenever anyone comments on their baby showers and asks about it.

(You can click on the pictures to see them larger and more details)
Carolyn's Baby Shower

So, the more I play around with Photoshop CS4 the more I LOVE IT!!  I scanned in the invitation from Carolyn's shower and extracted elements from it. Like that black scalloped border, it is made by a paper punch I have that I bordered the envelope with and the pink paper is the actual paper I used to make the envelopes out of. And the pregnant lady, that's a $1 stamp from Michaels. The blacked out umbrella is from a Cricut cartridge that I used on the banner then extracted out of a photo to use in my title. If you think about it that way you're not limited to just using digital images and fonts available on the internet. I literally have thousands of options between all the scrapbooking tools that I have and all the Cricut cartridges I own!!

These two are basically the same but I wasn't happy with  the way the left one turned out so I revised it into the one on the right and I included some more information about my services.
The font I used on these and the baby shower decorations is called Christie.



Melissa's Baby Shower

Same thing with these ones, I did the left first, didn't like it, changed it to the right one. I'm just including both of them on here to show the different aspects of the parties.

Now here's my Photoshop details: The title is actually the font on the Life is a Beach Cricut cartridge. I didn't even have to cut them out and photograph them, I just arranged them on my Cricut Design Studio program and pushed the Print Screen button to copy-paste them into Photoshop. Easy Peasy!

The It's A Boy charms are all from photos of the actual banner!! It was a little work to extract them cleanly from the photos but it was worth it, so cute! Thanks for looking (and making it to the end of this boring technical post). If you see something you like feel free to say so... I love comments!!

My Layouts

Okay, so these are really old pictures in the layouts but I've never scrapped them on anything. And...I actually made everything for the layouts myself!! Pat. Pat. Yes, I'm patting myself on the back.

And yes, I realize that these still need some journaling or explanation...at the very least, a date.

Learning to Design...

I am slowly but surely learning how to design Digital Scrapbooking items. I have been using a trial version of PhotoShop Creative Suite 3 Extended. Technically it has expired so now I have to find a way to purchase it, or something lesser and cheaper! Here is what I have made so far...

A brown wavy paper.

Oops, it looks like I may have some stray shadow at the top, I'll be fixing that.

A brick wall scene.

I envision a graffiti saying next to a photo of my daughter doing something artistic. Or maybe just playing in paint! Actually the only funny picture I have so far is one with her eating a green crayon and smiling with big chunks of wax in her teeth!

Snowman Scene Paper

Let it Snow Word Art

The Snow letters have really cool texture too!

Just a few buttons too.

It's not much but its a small start I guess. I never knew how much you can do with all the tools in PhotoShop!! It's really fun to play around and learn. Plus there are some really great websites out there that offer tons of tutorials on how to make your own stuff!

Here's one:http://www.ellies-treasures.com/scrapbooking-tuts/scrapbooking-tuts.html

Going Digital. I think I'm getting the hang of it!

I am really loving this digital scrapbooking stuff! But I still havn't decided if I am ever going to actually print out any of these layouts. Not sure how much it will end up costing if I only put one or two pictures per layout.



















This layout was done with a free downloaded kit from the coolest website: shabbyprincess.com. You can get lots of free downloads here: http://www.shabbyprincess.com/downloads.asp

p.s. Photo is of my younger sister and my daughter at the Alaska State Fair in the petting zoo.

My First Digital Pages

This was my first digital scrapbook page, but really its a hybrid because I made the page first, took a picture of it, then edited it with the journaling and pictures in digital scrapbook software. I don't think it really counts as a digital page.


















This page really was my "first" digi page. I used Adobe, which I don't know ANYTHING about and mixed a couple free kits that I downloaded from the internet.

Got some awesome downloads from this site http://freedigitalscrapbooking.com/clubmembersonly.html
Still not sure if it's better digitally or not...certainly faster.

Let me know what you think!?