A Blog with Bigger Pictures

Although as a fiction writer, I've been really happy with my story blogs right from the start, there's been one thing that really bugged me: No matter what I tried, I always ended up with my pictures being shown much smaller than they really are on my blogs. Of course you can click on each picture to view it full size, but not everyone knows this, and honestly, who's going to click on all those pictures to enlarge them anyway?

Thankfully, after playing around with my blogs for a while, I discovered how to change my layout so that I can have my pictures full size on my blog. It makes such a difference!

So, in this tutorial I'm going to show you exactly what I did to achieve this.

After logging in to your account, I would advise you to create a new - private blog just for your own eyes - to experiment. (Picture 1)

That way, if things go wrong, no damage is done to your story blog, and you can continue playing around with your settings until you've got everything just right.

Then, when you're happy with the results, all you have to do is "copy" the same settings to your story blog.

In the Layout Tab of your Blog's Dashboard, click Choose New Template. (Picture 2)

I used minima stretch. But minima lefty stretch might work too.(Picture 3)

Minima stretch doesn't look very interesting at all, so we'll have to jazz it up a bit. I want my blog to be black, e.g., so I clicked the Fonts and Colours Tab. (Picture 4)

What's really nice here, is that you get a real time preview of what your blog will look like once you apply the changes you made. Also, note that if you want to choose colours that aren't in the palette, you can even edit the colour hex code. Sadly, that feature somehow didn't work for me, but if you really want to, there's a work-around for that problem too. I'll come back to that in a minute.

I chose black for the background, a very light shade of grey for the blog title colour and border colour and white for the text. Other pastels for the links etc. It's really up to you which you choose.You'll most likely want to stay close to the original colours of your existing blog. When you're happy with the colours you chose, click the "save" button.

Since the colour hex code editor failed to save the colours I chose, I clicked the Edit HTML tab, and copied the hex code of the colour I wanted for my links into the value-code for the link colour, which now had the following values: Variable name="linkcolor" description="Link Color" type="color" default="#58a" value="#8eb8d5"

It's the last of all these values that I changed, as shown in picture 5.

You can change the colour hex code for all the other variables here too, if you want to. And since you're still working on your private, experimental blog, you don't have to be afraid to mess up either. None of the changes you make here, will affect your story blog.

A nice new layout for my blog also means I want to have a new header.I created and uploaded a new header that nicely fills the width of the page, and fits the atmosphere of the story without giving away too much.Be careful not to make your header too large, or it will "walk" off your screen. Keep in mind that most people nowadays probably use a screen resolution of 1024 x 768.A size of 810/850 x 250/310 pixels fits the bill quite nicely.