Typepad 101: Managing Blog Designs

Over time, while working on your blog, you've probably noticed that at the bottom of the Design tab, there's a list of designs.  It will look something like this:

This list is all of the designs that you've created for all of the blogs within your account.  But what does all of this mean?

You'll see a thumbnail for each design, giving you a quick idea of what the design looks like.  Next is the design's name.  If you created it using a different blog other than the one you're working on, you'll see "for" and then the name of the blog you created it for.  If there's an asterisk at the end of the name, that means it's applied to a blog within your account.  Finally, the orange CURRENT next to a blog means that this is the design that is currently being used on this blog.

Using the buttons next to each design, you can perform actions like customizing the design, applying it to a different blog, or even deleting it from your account completely.  You can read about all of these options in our Knowledge Base.

One of the things we get asked about a lot in support is why a design change applied on one blog also appears on another blog in the same account?  This is because blogs are shared across the entire account, allowing you to apply a design to more than one blog.  That means that if a design is applied to Blog A and Blog B, any changes you make will be applied to both blogs.

If you'd like to have similar, but not exactly the same designs for a blog (maybe you want different sidebar content, for instance), we would recommend that you instead duplicate the design and apply the duplicate to one blog.  Setting up a testing blog is a great way to test the duplicated design out before it's ready for prime time.

As always, we're here to help, so just let us know if you have any other questions!