Thursday, July 28, 2011

Customized Navigation Bar Using Pages


Would you like to put a navigation bar on your blog like mine in the picture above? When I started blogging a couple of years ago this required lots of html code and even creating picture links if you wanted a funky font. However, in the last year Blogger has made huge improvements with their customization options. It is super easy to do now. Seriously, anyone can do this!




For this type of navigation bar you will first need to make sure that you have created your pages*. It's just like writing a post only you go to posting, edit pages, then add a new page.

*I will show you a different kind of navigation bar that doesn't require pages in a later post.


2. Once you have your pages ready, go to the Design area of your dashboard, click on Page Elements, click Add a Gadget at the top of the page* just under your header, then scroll down until you find Add Pages.

* You can also drop this gadget in your sidebar if you would rather have your navigation there.


3. All of the pages that you have created will show up and you can check the boxes next to all of the pages that you would like visible on your navigation bar. You can then drag and drop your pages to arrange them the way that you would like. Then just save your changes!


4. Now to change the look of you navigation bar, you can go into the Blogger Template Designer, go to your advanced settings, and scroll down to Tabs Text. Then you can change the font, size, and color to compliment the look of your blog. You can also go down to Tabs Background to change the background color of all of the tabs and/or the color of the tab for the page the viewer is currently on.

That's it! You now have a Customized Navigation Bar!


I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. I haven't done any blogging tutorials for awhile partly because they tend to take even longer to write than a craft tutorial but also because I don't want to bore the more experienced bloggers. However, I frequently have friends come to me wanting to know how to do things on their blogs and recently two of them needed help with navigation bars. These kinds of posts also tend to receive comments of gratitude from someone who had been banging their head against the wall trying to figure it out for themselves until they came to my blog through a google search. So even if only one person out there finds these posts helpful it is still worth taking the time to write it out. :)

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3 comments:

Art Is Beauty said...

SERIOUSLY!!! IF I COULD REACH THRU THE COMPUTER I WOULD KISS YOU!!! NOW I JUST NEED TO FIND THE TIME BETWEEN PROJECTS TO DO THIS!!!! UGH!!! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.....YOU ARE THE BEST!!!

Alyssa said...

Thank you for taking the time to show us! ;)Alyssa of Boston Bee

Lady J said...

Thanks so much for the tute and all the pictures (AND ARROWS!!)
I'm bookmarking the page so I can come back when I have time.

TFS!