Upgrading To A New Blogger.com Layout Template

If you have upgraded your old Blogger^TM account to the new, improved Blogger system, then you know that you have the option to transfer your existing blog or blogs over to the new system. If you haven’t done this yet with the blog that we have been creating in this series, do that now and then come back to continue the tutorial.

Now that your blog has been imported into the new Blogger system, you still cannot use Blogger's new layout features on your blog until you upgrade to one of the new layout enabled templates. That’s what we will do now.

Once you have logged in to your new account, go to the Dashboard where you will notice that all of your blogs are listed. If you have created any blogs with the new system, these will be listed along with the tutorial blog that you transferred. To the right of each blog’s name, you will see a link labeled either “Template” or “Layout”. The blogs created with the new system will automatically have the Layout link and the transferred blog will still have the Template link.

From the Dashboard, click on that Template link to go to the Template tab in the Blogger workspace. Next, click on Customize Design to go to the next step.
You will see a message indicating that if you upgrade to a new layout enabled template, a copy of the old version of your blog will be saved for you. Click on Upgrade Your Template to see the list of available templates.
As you can see, these templates are basically the same as the old templates but they have been updated to work with the new Blogger system. So that we are all working on the same template, choose the Minima template and click Save Template.
Once your template has been changed, you should be taken to the Page Elements section. When you see the Upgrade Completed message, this means that the new template has been applied to your blog. You can now use the new Layout features.

Let’s click on the Preview button below this message to check out what your blog looks like with the new template. As you can see, we lost the font and color choices that we made for the header section and we also lost the RSS site feed and footer that we added to our blog manually in previous tutorials. Redoing these will be easy with the new features. But first let’s take a look around the new drag-and-drop Layout.
Lower down on this page, you will see a mockup of your blog. Each rectangle in the mockup represents a part of your blog such as the header, blog posts and archive sections. There are three types of rectangles.
1. The lighter tan rectangles with the solid blue outline represent the parts of your blog that can be edited but cannot be moved to a different location. As you can see, these sections are the header and blog posts sections. To edit these sections, just click on the Edit link in the rectangle.
2. The darker tan rectangles that have a solid blue outline represent the sections of your blog that can be both edited and moved to a different location on the page. Let’s give it a try. Click on one of these rectangles and drag it to the bottom of the blog page. Now click on the Preview button at the top of the mockup to see the change.
3. The last type of rectangle is the lighter tan color but has a dotted outline. These rectangles represent locations where you can add a new page element. If you want to see what these new page elements are, click on the Add a Page Element link to open the wizard.

Feel free to experiment as much as your like but don't save any changes at this time. Instead, click on the Clear Edits button to remove any changes that you made while experimenting.

Screen shots reprinted by permission from Google Inc. Google^TM, Blogger^TM and BlogSpot^TM are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Google Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

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