How to Design A Blog Header

For the past two years I have had a constant love-hate relationship with Splendid Surprises.  One month, we’d be best friends.  However, a few months later I’d forget about it and we would grow farther and farther apart.  My excuse for not keeping up with my blog was the fact that it wasn’t up to my expectations in terms of design. Thanks to Kathy at Cornerstone Confessions, I have learned how to design my very own blog header!  The only difference is that Cornerstone Confessions is hosted by another site and therefore her instructions needed to be slightly tweaked in order to work for Blogger blogs.  I figured I might as well share this information in order to help out future bloggers who run into the same design disasters as me! *Note: These instructions are written for use with Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.  The same thing should work for older versions of PowerPoint but the locations for some of the steps might be slightly different.

1. Open up a PowerPoint.

2. Go to the “Design” tab (4th tab from the left).

3. Click on “Page Setup” (1st button on the left).

4. A window should pop up.  Under the first drop down menu (It should read “Slides sized for”) select “custom”.  Change the width to 10 inches, change the height to 4 inches, and the last menu can stay at 1.  Change the orientation to “landscape”.  Once you have done all that, press okay.


5. Next, you can customize the slide however you’d like.  Keep in mind that this is going to be at the top of your blog so the font should be easy to read and the background shouldn’t be too bright.  Besides that, go crazy.

6. Once you are done click on the “File” tab (1st tab on the left).  Press “save as”.  You can change the name of it to whatever you’d like, just make sure you save it to a folder where you can easily access it and give it a name that you can easily recognize.  In the bottom drop down menu (It should read “Save file as type”) select “JPEG File Interchange Format”.  Click “save”.

7. Now, go to the Blogger homepage and under the dashboard click on “Design”.  Next, click “edit” in the “header” section.

8. A window should pop up.  Look under “Image” and select “From your computer”.  Next, click on the file you just saved.  Press “save”.  That window should close and you will be taken back to the layout design page.

9. Press the blue “Preview” button on the top and see your finished design!

10. If you are not fully satisfied with your design, you can edit the PowerPoint presentation and save it as a JPEG as many times as you’d like until you find the right fit. Viola! Your blog is now looking good and ready to go!