Favorite Features: Custom CSS

Welcome to our special series on our favorite Typepad features! Every other week, we'll debut a new article full of valuable tips and tricks for the Typepad team's top feature picks. Each feature is already built-in and available right at your fingertips, ready to help you get the most out of your blogging experience. Miss anything? Check out the other posts in our series here. This week's favorite feature post is from Colleen, who has been part of the Typepad team for over 8 years.

You might notice that we talk about Custom CSS a lot around here. Why? Because it's an awesome feature that allows you to customize your blog's design, no matter what level of expertise you have with coding. Absolute beginners can just copy code, plop it into their design and go on with their day. Or if you're a CSS expert, you can build a whole theme from scratch. You might be surprised how fun it is to see how the code you use translates to the actual blog. It can be really gratifying!

I love Custom CSS because it allows me to change a blog's style without touching the HTML or template tags. I work with a lot of subscribers on creating custom designs for their blogs and I recommend using Custom CSS for most situations. It allows for a great deal of flexibility without losing access to the other design features, like the Content page. If you've been curious about Advanced Templates because you want more flexibility but you're a little intimidated by all the code, then Custom CSS might be the best solution for you.

Three Little Birdies uses the Clean theme and Custom CSS to create a totally unique design

Even if you don't want to make a ton of changes to your blog, you can still use Custom CSS to make little customizations to perk things up. Don't like the font your theme uses? Try out a new one. Want to add a snazzy background image to your blog? You can do that, too. You can tweak your banner, style the navigation bar, or even use custom widths for your blog's columns. 

Are you using Custom CSS on your blog? Tell us it about it in the comments for this post. We love to see our favorite features in action!

Comments

[Kofla Olivieri]

I use custom CSS in two of my blogs, it is the only way to decorate the look of them.

[Kofla Olivieri]

Here is a link to the two blogs I mentioned:

http://www.koflaolivieri.com/

http://www.koflaolivieri.com/zx14r/

[MP]

I use it to set my navigation menu buttons to default to the right instead of left. =)

[regina easter]

I wish there was a way to put little pictures under each of my headings on my page......here is my page:
http://thecuttingcafe.typepad.com/
does anyone know how.......i mean like under the sections of ANNIVERSARY AUTUMN-FALL etc....thanks

[Melanie]

Hi Regina!

Are you talking about the links in your Featured Post there? What I'd suggest is inserting small thumbnail images and aligning them with the links - you can definitely do this and make it look like you want! If you'd like to open a Help ticket in your Dashboard about this, we can go into depth and help you accomplish that.