All the customising we’ve done so far has been to our Current Design. One very handy feature of TypePad is that you can save multiple designs and apply them to your blog with just one click.
In the Design tab of your blog, select “Saved Designs”.
You will get a list of all your designs across all your blogs. This means you can share designs between blogs. (If you have an account that lets you have multiple blogs, then you can create a test blog account to develop a new design and when you’re happy with it, apply it to your main blog – we will show you this in a separate lesson.)
Whatever design is currently being used by your blog will have an icon with a tick in a green circle in the flag column – obviously, there can only be one design used at any one time.
Managing Saved Designs
If you have more than one design (eg from another blog, like a test blog), you can click the “Preview” for another design in the Actions column to see what that would look like on your blog.
If you like it, you can click “Apply” in the Actions column and it will immediately replace your previous design on your blog.
You can always rename any design by clicking “Rename” in the Actions column.
Your design name will then become an editable field which you can change.
When you have finished, you will find that you now have a “Save” link in the Actions column for that design, click it to save your design’s edited name.
Making new designs
There are three ways of making a new design:
- You can duplicate an existing design and then make changes to it;
- You can create a new “drag and drop” design;
- You can create a new “advanced template” design.
“Drag and drop” designs are just your standard TypePad designs that we have been walking you through these past few lessons. They are called drag and drop because they allow you to easily add content modules and drag and drop them to arrange them how you like in the design’s layout.
Advanced templates are a little more complicated and if you use them, you lose the easy drag and drop features that we’ve been showing you. We will show you how to create an advanced template in our next lesson.
Duplicating an existing design
Select the design you want to duplicate by ticking the checkbox next to it. Click on the “Duplicate” button.
TypePad will create a copy of your selected design.
To edit this copied design, you need to first apply it to your blog (remember this will become your blog’s new design) by clicking “Apply” in the Action column.
Once applied, you can click on “Current Design” to customised your new design.
Creating a new drag and drop design
On top of your design list, you should have a feature that lets you “Create a new design” with a drop down. Make sure “Drag and Drop” is selected (it should be by default) and click “Create”.
You will then see a new design called “Drag and Drop” show up in your design list – you can rename this if you wish.
To edit this copied design, you need to first apply it to your blog (remember this will become your blog’s new design) by clicking “Apply” in the Action column.
Once applied, you can click on “Current Design” to customise your new design.
Deleting Designs
Warning: remember that designs are shared across blogs so if you delete a design in one blog, you delete it for ALL blogs.
You can easily delete designs by selecting their checkbox and clicking on “Delete”.
You will get a warning popup to confirm you did really want to delete that design, click “OK” if you are certain you want to delete the selected design.
Next up, we’ll go through how to create a test TypePad blog.
…
This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.
