I’ve been really slacking with the freebies lately. I know, I suck. But, I do have a few scrapped design concepts that would make cute freebies. Anyone want to take a stab at creating some freemade blogger templates / WP Themes out of them? I’d be glad to collaborate with you! Just drop me an email or fill out the contact form and I’ll get back to you asap.

I get TONS of emails daily with questions regarding the Blogger freemades that I offer here. Readers wanting to know about a font I used on a particular design, others needing help with their image hosting, others wanting help modifying their templates into 3 columns or needing help adding items to their sidebars. Etc. Etc.

Up until recently I’ve been able to manage handling these emails along with the emails from prior, new or potential clients that have questions regarding their websites, hosting, or what have you. However, lately it’s become quite the task for me as we have been listed in various websites offering links to free blogger templates- thus increasing site traffic significantly. So, unfortunately at this time I have decided I can no longer offer support for the freemade blogger templates.

I will keep the existing freemades available for download and I will continue to post new freemades, however please note that support for these will no longer be available as of today March 27, 2008. I apologize for the inconvenience this may cause some of my visitors, but it is crucial for me to weed out the things that are unnecessarily keeping me from offering 100% of my attention to my paying clients.

I think this is the one question I get asked the most, so instead of emailing each person separately, I thought I’d do a quick tutorial on the subject and link it for future reference. The first thing you will need to add your blog title to your new template is an image editor. Not just any image editor, like Picassa but one that will allow you to add text to your images. I’ve linked a few resources (free) online below. For this tutorial, I’ve used picnik since it was the first one that came up for me on google.
Picnik
FotoFlexer
Online-Image Editor

Part I – Editing your Image

Upload the blank header image that was included in the zip file you downloaded to the site.
Click on the “Create” tab.
Click on the “Text” tab.
Add your blog title in the text field and select your font, size and color preferences.
Drag your text into desired position.
Click on the “Save and Share” tab.
Click on “Save Photo” button.
You now have your edited header image which you can upload to imageshack, photobucket or any other free image hosting service of your choosing. I always use imageshack because it’s easy and requires no registration ;) But you can easily upload your image right into photobucket from Picnik if you have an acccount already.

Part II -Linking your new image

Once you have your image hosted, copy your image url.
Log into your blogger account and select “layout” from the dashboard.
Click on “Edit Html”
Scroll down to where you see the link to the sample header image. You’re looking for something similar to this snippet of code:

#header-wrapper {
background:url(“http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/5567/headerzo3.gif”) no-repeat;

Replace the image url with the url of your newly hosted and edited image and preview your template before you save your changes. Voila!

1. Login to Blogger Beta with your account.
2. Click on Layout (you’ll go direct to Template tab) or Setting where blog you want to Edit.
3. Choose the Template tab of your blog then click on Edit HTML.
4. Next scroll down to the end of your page and choose Revert to Classic Template.
5. Copy all the code of the template and paste it into your blog.
6. Click on SAVE TEMPLATE. Enjoy!