To see more of these codes in detail, download my Generic Blogger Template.

Section 1:

The 'header' of the code. Basically it contains important information about the template code and the title of your blog. Best of all, you don't have to worry about anything in this section. It's a standard header for all templates. The only time you add some codes here is when you want to put some meta tags (additional information about your blog for SEO).

Section 2:

This is the CSS Styling Section. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, a web language used to control the style of a HTML document. This is the section that you want to know the most if you want to modify your existing template or design a new template. Eventhough it is a web programming code, you can still do a lot of things on you template design if you understand the structure of this section without knowing much about HTML and CSS. We'll get to this part in more detail later.

Section 3:

This is the Body or Data of the code - the most important part that fetches all your content from Blogger database and puts it in the right place into your blog when somebody is looking at your blog. This is also the section that tells your blog which part comes first - the Header, Sidebars, Main, Post, Footer, etc. But it doesn't set the appearance of the blog and how it would look like on the internet (because that part is controlled by the CSS styling section).

You basically don't have to worry much about this part too, just like the 1st Section. But you will have to know a little bit about this section if you want to start adding extra widgets that cannot be put using the Add Page Element button, like the social bookmarking buttons - Digg, AddThis, RSS buttons; or if you want to put Adsense codes in special places like in the Post Page; or putting Google Analytics code to track visitors to your blog; and many other things. Most of the time, there are easy instructions already available to help you add these things in your blog. So, again, nothing much to worry about in this section.

Before designing a template, you must have an idea of what the basic structure of a template is. Generally, the actual structure of any templates are not exactly the same. But, by knowing the basic structure, you can easily get the ideas of how to tweak your existing templates, design a template, and how to change it into a different structure.


Some parts of the template structure are obvious from what you can see on most blogs: the headers, footers, and posts sections. But there are some sections (I'll call these sections blocks or containers afterward) that are not visible on the computer screen, but important HTML-wise to build a practical and proper working template.








Going from the biggest to the smallest blocks:

1. Body: the outer most block is the Body of your template (basically everything that the computer screen covers).


2. Outer-wrapper: this container covers your whole template (the body is more like the outside of your template). In general, you build a wrapper to place a multiple of smaller blocks inside it. The most common blocks inside this Outer-wrapper is the Header, Content, and Footer.


3. Header: this block is the top most part of your blog (the name is quite obvious). But inside the Header you will have other sub-blocks too - the Header Title block, the Header Description block, and others such as the Adsense banners, a menu bar, etc. So, to wrap all these sub-blocks inside one large container, the largest container in the Header section is usually a Header-wrapper that wraps everything inside.


4. Content: below the Header is the Content-wrapper - basically the most important container block of all. Immediately inside this wrapper are the Sidebar containers (1,2 or any number of sidebars) and the Main container (which contains your posts, comments, or some ads).


5. Footer: is the bottom most container of your template. As in the Header section, you'll also need a Footer-wrapper to contain other sub-blocks in the Footer section.


6. Main: the Main-wrapper is the outer most container in the Main section which goes inside the Content-wrapper. Inside this Main-wrapper are the Post block, Comment block, Date Header, and other widgets created from the Add Page Element option.


7. Sidebar: is the block that contains all your side widgets - About Me, Labels, Archive, Text, HTML, Adsense, etc. In a standard Blogger template, you will usually find only 1 sidebar - hence the 2-column template (Main and Sidebar). But it's actually easy to add multiple number of sidebars. The most common ones are 2 sidebars - or the 3-column template. You will see from these tutorial series that once you understand the template structure, it's actually easy to add and move the sidebars to the left or right of your Main container.


8. Blog Post: this block contains the important stuff - your Posts Titles, Post, Post Author, Labels, etc.

One other way to see this structure is from the hierarchical point of view. Starting from the largest container to its sub-containers, the structure looks like this:

• Body


• Outer-wrappe


• Header-wrapper


• Blog Title


• Blog Description


• Other widgets


• 
  
  Content-wrapper


• 
  
  Sidebar-wrapper (1,2,3...)


• 
  
  Main-wrapper


• Date Header


• Posts


• Post Title


• Post Content (or called Post Body)


• Post Footer (Author, Labels, etc)


• Comments


• Feed Link


• Other widgets (mostly ad units)


• Footer-wrapper


• Footer text (disclaimer, copyrights, etc)


• Other widgets

Once you understand this basic structure, it'll be easier to start learning about the structure of the Blogger template code. Learning the code structure is not about learning HTML or CSS, but more about how the template code is organized, which is pretty much like how the container structure is organized. It's surprising that even with little knowledge on web programming, you can customize your template quite a lot just by understanding the basic structure and some CSS language.

This tutorial is a very quick guide to teach you how to change or design your own Blogger templates. It's easy to understand and follow, especially to those who has no knowledge in HTML programming.

The tutorial is split into a number of sub-tutorial modules that explain specific parts of Blogger template design in detail. The best way to learn is by going through the module sequence one by one. But if you are familiar with the basics, you can jump into the more advanced modules. The earlier modules are focused on explaining the basic structure of the template design and the template code so that you understand more about a Blogger template in general. The later modules explain each section of a Blogger template in more detail and help you go through the process of coding and designing a template in a step-by-step approach.

n the tutorial, some of the names and terms are based on my own template design, but I'll explain them as general as possible so you get the bigger picture and can adapt to different template designs.

Tutorial Contents

• Tutorial 1: The Structure of a Blogger Template
• Tutorial 2: The Structure of a Blogger Template Code
• Tutorial 3: The Structure of CSS Styling SectionTutorial
• 4: Setting the Properties of a Container
• Tutorial 5: Common Containers and Elements in a Blogger Template
• Tutorial 6: Using the Generic Blogger Template
• Tutorial 7: Setting the Template Size
• Tutorial 8: The Body Section of the Blogger Template Code
• Tutorial 9: More Explanation about the Body Code
• Tutorial 10: Making a 3-Column Template and More ...
• Tutorial 11: Starting Your Own Blogger TemplateTutorial
• 12: How To Embed Images as Background