Top Hat Designs

See it at Cook County Blog - screenshot to follow when I have more time.

Check it out! 

This one has a striking image of the Chicago skyline in the header.

It's a relatively new blog, so the sidebars and other tweaks should be realtively simple to implement.

Time is short, but I managed to tweak this one and get it out there.  There are a few Illinois blogs that need facelifts and I'm hoping to offer my services to them.  Illinois Crime and Politics can be seen here, but there is some tweaking that needs to be done to the sidebars and to the commenting system.

As I mentioned before, I favor the Disqus commenting system because it's somewhat robust; and you can moderate the comments with more control than comes with the blogger system.

Some type of statcounter or sitemeter should be installed so you can track visitors, too - or use something like Google Analytics.  I'll be covering analyzing visitors in a post soon.

The picture on the right is the old template, I just installed the new template which is the one with the red header.

Here is what I thought was an unusual color combination...you can see the test blog here.

I like how the headings almost glow in this design...and of course the header image can be changed to whatever it is you'd like.

Now...I will be presenting free templates as time goes on (in this post are two examples), but I will ask for your sign in information so that they can be installed automatically with Artisteer rather than have you mess with it yourself. Some people are simply not very technically savvy and I'm here to help you so that all you have to worry about is writing and content.

The problem as I see it with some of these "free templates" for blogspot in particular, are that the designers have embedded ads and references in the code that they make money from. That strikes me as a little bit tacky. Some of these free templates are broken; and don't even support someone writing on them for very long - that's a problem I personally have run across in my blogging adventures.

You will find no such thing on my Artisteer designed templates except for a link to Artisteer and a link mentioning Top Hat Designs.

I have a number of ideas for free offerings as I think that one huge segment of people that designers have forgotten and or purposely avoided are the regular gun-toting God loving American who loves his country and family and wants to blog about them. So I will be presenting some family-friendly designs and patriotic designs - and Christian designs - and even Christmas designs in order to provide some balance to the unbalanced offerings of "free templates".

And what do you know, I'll offer the free service of installing the template FOR YOU for FREE.

If you need some tweaking, however, that will cost you about $35.00.

I'll be updating this post with some examples of templates that I have at the ready for upload and minor customization - yours for the taking - just ask - and fill out the contact form (tab below the header).

Here's an example of a template I just kicked out for a woman that wants to blog about her life...if you want to take a look at what it would look like on blogger, check out the test blog here.

This type of template can be easily customized with a picture of you; or you and your kids;- and of course you'd pick the name of your blog...maybe you've already started writing and are just frustrated with the limited number of templates blogger has and want to liven it up a bit.

Whatever your motivation, I'm convinced that cosmetic overhaul will give your blogging a lift.

I know every time I've done it for myself, I've felt a sense of elation...but maybe that's just me?

Kender's Musings received a facelift from me-at-Top Hat Designs last week; that included a major overhaul.

He had the old template, which was upgraded and allows simpler modifications of the sidebar widgets and content behind the scenes on the blogger dashboard.

Along with the Disqus commenting system which includes "reactions" on the posts.

Check it out.

Leave him a comment and say "hey".

He has a number of sweet poetry entries and entries about American politics.