What do you do when your blog doesn't look classy?

     Its been quite some time since I have used the designer settings of the blog. My original blog had a bland feel to it. But that didn't stop people reading it. With the tools available at that time I was able to present a simple template, which was not very bad when compared to the other pages at that time. I had some followers as soon as I started, mostly my friends and it kept the fire going during the early phase of my blogging life. Once I made it look a little pleasing to my eyes I stopped tweaking it. It has been the same ever since.

     Now that I decided its time to go anonymous, I had to start all over again. How do you do it? 

1. Do it yourself; the hard way: These kinds of jobs takes time and practice. I was short on both counts. I made a template which seemed very good to me. Then I visited some of the popular new generation blogs. Some of them were so good that I mistook them for websites. So I started my search. I wanted to widen the area available for the post. Someone in the web suggested that I should change the HTML settings!!! What was HTML? The search began. I found it, but couldn't find what settings to change. I read the lines one by one and finally zeroed in on some numbers next to the word "width". I changed the numbers. And there it was, the width increased.  
2. Cant do it yourself, then copy it from others; the easier way: I had to put tabs for my links. But I had no pages to link. So I had to learn how to make pages before linking them to the tabs. Then I learned that the information on the tabs was from an old web site. Google had made the process simpler. They had made a gadget for it. I started using the gadget. It was so user friendly. I finished the same job in 10 minutes, which took me 3 days to learn and make manually. And the new tabs looked cool. But my heart was with the first one. It was the first link that I made. So I decided to keep both. One on top of the page just below the header and the other just above the footer.                                                             
3. Ask someone else to copy it for you; the easiest way: Still not satisfied with the way my blog looked, I decided to seek advise. Who will do this for me? I searched for active bloggers in my friend list and I found someone. He works in the building next to me. I met him on chat. Fixed up an appointment and as always was late for the appointment. He was waiting for me. Water was boiling in the coffee maker and two beautiful blue but narrow mugs were ready, with sugar and nescafe in it. Coffee was ready in an instant. I opened my page, logged in my blog and handed over the control to him. One by one he changed the settings. Showed me the controls. By the time we had sipped the mugs dry my blog was ready. It had a classy look to it. At least compared to what I had achieved, it was classy. Then we discussed a lot about the templates, colour schemes, styles of presentation and more. Two hours of discussion was worth more than three days of online self help tools.

     After all this I finally realised, when you have someone willing to copy it for you then it is better to skip points one and two. The most important benefit..... you don't have to make the coffee. After all the work gets done, we should not forget to thank him for the help. We never know when we might need him again.

    So Mr O......., Thank you very much for the coffee. You make some really good coffee and I will be back for more. (This guy is still not following me)