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Blogger has some quite awful templates to offer, but one way to make it look less terrible to the eye of a layman (me) is with this background picture:

enter image description here

Yet, I haven't seen many popular blogs that do this. Is setting a large, colorful (but relatively undistracting - you be the judge here though) image as the background considered a bad practice?

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7

The good:

  • You like the way it looks.
  • It makes it easy to identify your blog (uniqueness).

The bad:

  • Check the file size. Large images can slow down the site. I'd try to limit it to 150KB.
  • It ends up being the branding for your website (what makes your website identifiable), but it looks rather generic. You probably want to brand your website more strongly.
  • It isn't going to be visible on all screen resolutions. You have a wide monitor. Users with laptop screens, mobile phones, and portrait monitors are never going to know that the image exists. They will see the rather boring look and feel to which you object.

Some other options for a more exciting look to your blog would be:

  • A cover photo
  • A logo
  • Your own color scheme
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  • Now if only it was in my power to make Blogger look half-decent. I like the way it functions but Christ is it ugly and outdated. Makes me want to switch to WordPress...
    – jcora
    Dec 10 '13 at 19:27
  • @yannbane: Aren't Blogger templates creatable/customisable? code.blogger.com
    – MrWhite
    Dec 10 '13 at 21:03
  • Customization is severely limited by the number of templates and their original design. No amount of tweaking could fix it really. And I've actually just switched to WordPress for several reasons: it looks better and is more customisable, syntax highlighting without hacks, it's better at actually managing my content, and Blogger is bugged out. My custom domain that I've had before on that blog simply wouldn't work for hours, and search did not work. Also Google could integrate the Docs editor in Blogger, that'd make me switch.
    – jcora
    Dec 10 '13 at 23:15
1

I strongly disagree with use of such background pictures. You want eye of user to be brought to your main content, not your background !

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0

Unless you use a dynamic template, you have almost total freedom to customise in Blogger - without having to pay for self-hosting.

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