First Things First

et me share with you really quickly some of my new discoveries. I don't really want to give them all away, but they're free and too fun and easy to use to keep to myself. Besides, as much as I want you to be impressed with my blog, I think it's more impressive to know you can do the same things with yours if you like.
I have a short list of things that I think are really cool... but you may not and I may be exposing just how new I am to this whole blog design thing.

Cool Thing 1: You can change your Nav bar color. If you're on Blogger, that navy blue bar at the top doesn't have to be navy blue. Did you know that?   'Cause I just found that out today and I've written around 400 posts on two blogs and edited the layouts and all that junk and never knew. Go to "customize" then to the "Layout" tab on your blog. There's that familiar group of rectangles where you can add a blog rolls, slideshows and the like. Well, look at the top of that group of boxes under the "Save" button and there you will find an edit option for the Nav bar. How did I never see that?! There aren't any really amazing color choices or anything, but it was sure great to know I had choices. I dislike navy in general.

Cool Thing 2: There are at least two, and I'm sure more, blog designers that offer some of their templates for free. The one I used for this blog is up there in the upper left corner - Smitten Blog Designs. The one I used for my other two blogs is Aqua Poppy Designs.

Cool Thing 3: I have downloaded over 300 CUTE fonts for free at Kevin and Amanda's blog. I love having access to all these unique fonts. They are people's actual handwriting, so there's really nothing like it you could purchase. I used them when I made Eden's 2nd birthday party invites. AND... There's a tutorial that takes you step by step through how to put them to use on your blog even if you've never touched code before. If you're good at following directions, you can do it.

Cool Thing 4: This blog posts one awesomely designed letter of the alphabet a day and the code to go with it. Just go to the "Edit HTML" tab while you're composing your post and insert the letter where you'd like. I'm using one for my signature and random ones for the first letter of posts.

Fun stuff huh?!