In TypePad, like other content management systems, the design of your blog is separated as much as is possible from the content of your blog. This means that when you write your blog posts, you shouldn’t do things like specify what font you want your words to display in – you just write the words. You may indicate something is a title, a heading or even bolded – but even this isn’t actually strictly design, because you’re not indicating what a title, a heading or bolding looks like. Your title could be 48pts and bright blue or it could be 14pt and green, similarly bolded could just be bolded, or it could be red. 

The beauty of this separation is that at any time you can change your design and not have to go through every post you’ve written to make the changes there. You could have a new design each day if you so wished (and it wouldn’t scare off your readers…).

TypePad have made changing your design very simple. Go to the “Design” tab for your blog. You will find yourself in the “Current Design” section 

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All TypePad plans (except the Basic plan) allow you to have multiple blogs. You should always keep one aside to use as a test blog.

We will be spending quite a few of the following lessons showing you how to customise your TypePad blog’s design. As you’ve seen from the last lesson, TypePad lets you maintain multiple designs at any one time and share them across all your blogs, but it won’t let you edit designs until they are actually live on your blog.

Because you don’t want to be editing a design that is live on your blog, what you can do is create or edit a design on a test blog and then try out design changes on the test blog’s active design. When you’re happy with your new design, apply it to your current blog. Read the rest of this entry »