Why Custom Templating?

A template is just that, a template for how your blog pages look.  It defined what items appear in what locations and sometimes what they should look like.  If you haven't noticed, there are only a dozen or so predefined templates.  Although at the time of this posting there are only a dozen or so blogs at blogs.usd.edu, but soon it will be littered with blogs and every other person will have the same template.  Meaning there will be a lot of identical looking blogs.  A blog is an opportunity to stand out and express yourself as an individual.  You wouldn't want to look like someone else, so why would you want a blog that looked like someone else's.  A custom template offers an opportunity to not only express yourself through your writings but through creative design as well.

Getting Started

Designing your own template is actually going to involve some XHTML and CSS knowledge.  I'm sure you could find a way to do it with an IDE like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, but you will be more pleased with the results if your write it yourself.

The best place to start is to actually pick one of the predefined templates that contain all the elements you would like on your blog and then reverse engineer it.  After you have selected a theme, click customize under the theme selection tab.  This will export the theme to your blog and generate all the files you need for customizing your theme.  View other posts in my Apache Roller category for additional information.