How to customize your blog with no technical skills or fancy software:

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Every high-profile blog I know has one thing in common: a customized design. Most blogging accounts offer you the option of customizing your blog using HTML, CSS or other codes, and there are professionals who offer services in exactly this kind of graphic design. What do you do, though, if you are code-illiterate, operating on a tight (or non-existent) budget, and don't even have proper photo-editing software on your computer?

You improvise.

In my case, the programs available to me are iPhoto and Powerpoint (yes, I'm a Microsoft-Macintosh fence-sitter). After much trial and error, here is my tutorial on how to make a blog that looks customized, while working within templates and programs that anyone can use:

How to Make a Custom Background

1. Take a suitable background photo. I wanted a fairly monochromatic texture, so I laid some lace over a piece of scrapbooking paper and snapped a picture.

2. Open the image in iPhoto. Check the size of your photo by right-clicking on it and selecting "Show File." If you have to compress the file (mine was 2 MB and blogger only supports images up to 300 KB), go to File - Export. Find the bar that says "Size" and change it to "Small".

3. Set the image as your background. In Blogger this can be done by going to Design - Template Designer - Background - Choose File. You can replace the background on any of blogger's templates, but I just used the plainest of the "simple" templates to avoid any extra formatting that might not match my pictures.

How to Create a Banner (using a single picture)

1. Take a picture in the colour scheme you want. Again, I just threw some lace and buttons on a sheet of scrapbooking paper.

2. Compress the file as above.

3. Open the image in PowerPoint. Open the toolbox and crop to the desired dimensions.

4. Create a textbox on top of your picture. For a proper logo, you would want to create a font with no copyright, but for our purposes this works fine.

5. Holding the Shift button, click both the textbox and the image. Right click and select "Grouping", then "Group."

6. Right click again and select "Save as Picture."

7. If the blogging program you are using requires a specific banner size (760 pixels by 100 pixels is common), you may have to open your file in iPhoto and crop it again there. Go to "Edit," "Crop," "Custom..." and type in the dimensions. Save your banner.

8. Upload your banner. In Blogger, you can do this by going to "Design" and clicking "Edit" in the "Header" box at the top of the page. Choose the banner's file and specify if you want it behind, above, or in place of your blog title and description.

How to Create a Banner (using multiple pictures)

1. Take pictures in the colour scheme you want. I chose pictures of some of my denim quilts. Import the pictures to iPhoto and crop as desired; square is best for this design.

2. Open PowerPoint and insert your pictures. Place them side by side, resizing them as necessary. Since I only used two pictures, I made a large textbox to fill in the rest of the space. To make it prettier, I put a rectangle behind it and filled it with a standard PowerPoint texture.

3. Follow steps 5-8 from above.