Spruce Up Your Site Part 2 / Tech Help For Bloggers Series

Welcome to the third installment of the Tech Help for Bloggers Series. This series is focused on providing technical tips and advice to help you understand and get the most out of your blogging experience. Here is the schedule of posts:

• July 1       Getting Started / Intro to HTML
• July 4       Sprucing Up Your Site Part 1 / Blog and social media buttons
• July 8       Sprucing Up Your Site Part 2 / Creating pages and navigation bars
• July 15     Getting to Know the Settings in Blogger / Your blog, behind the scenes
• July 22     Layouts and Templates in Blogger / How to change your blog's look
• July 26     CSS and Web Fonts / How to use custom fonts for your blog
• July 29     Organizing Events / Creating forms, polls, and sharable documents
• Aug 1       Hosting A Linky Party / Guest Post w/ Laura of TGIFF! and Quokka Quilts
• Aug 5       Pinterest and Flickr / Features for managing image sharing
• Aug 12     Giveaways / Technical tips and tricks for hosting a successful giveaway

Today we are looking at how to create pages and navigation bars. 

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I recommend backing up your template again today (you can read more about how to do that here). 

Creating Pages and Navigation Bars

First, lets look at how to create additional pages on your blog. In Blogger, it's really a simple process. Just access the Design menus of your blog and click on "Pages" from the list on the left. This will allow you to access and edit any pages you have created, while also allowing you to make new ones. 

Click on the "New page" drop down menu at the top of the page. There will be two options available: "Blank page", which allows you to make a fresh page using your existing blog template formatting, or "Web Address", which allows you to create a page link to another website. The Web Address feature is helpful if you are linking to say your online store or to another blog or web site you have created. 

Once you have created your page, you can also add in a navigation bar on your blog's home page to allow people to access it. From the Design menus, select "Layout". Click add a "Gadget". From the pop-up Gadgets menu select the "Pages" option.

This will bring up a new settings page that allows you to control which pages are visible, the page order, and whether you would like your pages to be automatically added to this navigation bar once you publish them. 

These is also an important tip at the bottom and indicates how the navigation bar changes in appearance depending on where you position it in your blog layout. Make sure to Save your settings before closing this pop-up page. Finally you can decide where you would like to postion your page navigation, either as a set of tabs under your blog title in a bar format or as a list in your sidebar. Because the Layout page is completely interactive, you can simply drag and drop your gadgets into different positions within the layout, which allows you to change and reposition your blog components easily.

I hope you find this post helpful. Feel free to leave me feedback about this topic and the other posts in the series letting me know what you'd like to see more of and if the tutorials are covering the topics you'd like to know more about. So far, I haven't gotten into the more advanced topics, so if you'd like to see more of that, also feel free to let me know. Thanks!