As of today, 11/17/09, I will no longer be offering free templates. Also, if you have one of my free templates you may think about either hosting the images at your own image hosting site like photobucket.com or finding a new template all together. I am incurring monthly bandwidth charges that I am not being compensated for on this blog. It was a great idea, but it is just too big of a task for one person. None of the templates you previously downloaded are guaranteed to be around forever so please feel free to email me if you need help hosting the images.

I will still be offering blog design and html tips periodically.


Monday, September 1, 2008

How to Download Templates

How to Download and Use These Templates

1. Click on the "Download" link of the template you would like.

2. Open that .txt file up

3. Go to your old html code

4. BACK UP YOUR TEMPLATE

5. Change your OLD template to Minima

6. Near the bottom of your old template you will need to copy from <b:section to </b:section> for the crosscol-wrapper, main-wrapper, side-wrapper, and footer (if you have widgets in these it will say). Here is an example of the crosscol-wrapper and main-wrapper and what to copy:

Here is an example of the sidebar-wrapper and what to copy:

7. Place the OLD widget codes into your NEW html that is in the .txt file one by one.
8. When you are finished copying widget codes you can then select all, copy, and paste this NEW entire code into your HTML on blogger.
9. If you are about to delete widgets it will warn you!
10. If all is well, then SAVE!

Free Custom Headers

That's right! Free!

Once you have downloaded a template you can come back and send me a message about which one you chose and if you would like a free custom header I would be happy to help!

I need you to think about what you would like the header to say and if you would like to include a personal picture. I also need you to include a link to your blog so I can see what I'm working with.

Please give me your contact information by clicking the "Contact Me" button at the top of the page!

Once you have received your header please think about making a donation for the time!

About This Site

The idea for Blog Designs Free came about after I started to become interested in creating blog templates! I first started by helping out friends and giving simple html tips. Soon I was sucked in and ready to learn more! I decided to compile all of my creativity and offer it for FREE on one site!

Why Free?

First of all, I am by no means a professional. I just love to be creative and see how each new design will turn out! I do not feel like this work should have a charge. I do however, appreciate donations of any kind if you appreciate and use my templates. The designs do take quite a bit of time and energy. Secondly, I wanted to be able to provide cute sites to bloggers who could not afford or did not wish to spend hard earned money on site designs (I can feel your pain and that's why I decided to learn how to do it myself!).

Make sure to click the Free Custom Headers link to find out more about how to get your very own personalized header for the template you downloaded! Or, you can use the pre-made template as is!

Please feel free to contact me with any questions!

How to Create a Contact Form in Google

You may already know that the "bots" or "spiders" can retrieve your email address when it has been published on your site. Even spelling it out (soandso [at] suchandsuch [dot] com) they can find you and send SPAM!

A way around it is to develop a contact form for your site. You can do this easily and FREE using Google Docs!

Here are the steps:
1. Create an account with Google and open up the Docs page
2. Click on "New" and scroll down to "Form"
3. The "form screen" will pop up and give you step by step instructions for what questions you would like to have
4. SAVE
5. Click on "More Actions" and choose "Embed". This will give you the html code you can put onto your website!
6. Or... you can copy the URL address at the bottom and link to the form.
7. MAKE SURE you click out of the form and then open it back up. In the right hand corner you will see a button that says "Share". Make sure you click this and scroll down to "Set Notification Rules" so that you will be notified any time the form changes!

Scroll Box Code

I have been asked pretty frequently how to get a scroll box for widgets (or people's site buttons). Well, ask no more... here is the code:

<div style="border: 0px solid ; overflow: auto; height: 350px; width: 145px; color: black; background-color: white;">YOUR BUTTON CODES HERE</div>


You simply want to add the html of the buttons where it says "YOUR HTML CODES HERE". You can change the appearance of your scroll box by changing the height, width, adding a border and adding a color (add color name after "solid").

If this happens to be a faulty code please send me a message. Also, if you are having any trouble with this please feel free to "Contact Me" at the top of this page!