Want to expand your technical prowess (and the bells and whistles on your blog)? Nickie from Typecast offers this down-to-earth advice on incorporating HTML even if you’re resolutely non-techie.
When I first started blogging I was very happy with the basic, easy to use format that Blogger (my platform of choice) offered. The What You See Is What You Get (WSYWIG) dashboard format suited my what-on-earth-is-HTML-no-don’t-tell-me-I-don’t-need-to-know attitude. Coding and colours? Blogger provided tools that did all that for me. I just had to highlight a word and click an icon. Et voila: pretty things happened.
Since then, blogging has somewhat escalated into the forefront of internet land and I felt the need to stand out from the crowd. I had noticed at least nine blogs with very similar layouts and colours to my blog. How was anyone going to remember me?
Blogger were developing their standard templates so I chose a new one and incorporated a background, again using their one-click tool service. But I still needed more. I wanted bells and whistles and a great big flag shouting “THIS IS NICKIE FROM TYPECAST – OVER HERE… YES… ME!” but I realised that to add the all-singing-all-dancing wonderments (social engagement buttons, displaying the RSS feed, badges to brag about my achievements and affiliations) then I would need to start understanding the dreaded HTML code.
I’m not a computer wiz but I do like to have a mediocre knowledge of what I am doing. So I Googled for a few how-to tutorials, based on what I wanted to do (make an image click through to a web page was one). I felt that there wasn’t enough plain, step-by-step instructions for people, like me, who are a bit afraid of completely messing up their blog by inserting an incorrect piece of code and have their whole blog disappear into the ether.
So I have written a few blog pieces (and there are more on the way, as and when I find out new tricks of the trade) to help you to take that first step into the unknown world of HTML and make your blog unique and even more interactive. Come on over and have a read. Once you start to use HTML you will recognise similar pieces of code and you will start to experiment yourself.
About Jennifer Howze
Jennifer Howze is the Creative Director and co-founder of BritMums. She blogs about family travel at Jenography.net, tweets at @JHowze and Instagrams at @JHowze. Previously, she wrote the Alpha Mummy blog at The Times and as a journalist has contributed to The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, Budget Travel, CNN.com, Allure, SELF and Premiere, among others. She won The Maggie Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America for a health article in Seventeen magazine.