Creating a start page

The king of the trickes to create a classic website-like look and feel. A cheap trick is to set the number of posts to "1" and after publishing the post, change the publish date to sometime in the far away future. But that is a bit of a workaround, clever, does the trick, but somehow not a longterm sol.ution. Especially if some team members have trouble using and remebering the trick.

So here is a better one. A very good description can be found here. But we adapt it to Nexus5: neat, tidy and elegant.

We basically say, if the user is on the home page, please show the Featured Section (which we have named Welcome). If not please show the blog entries.

Go to the Layout - Edit HTML and find the section with   id='content' 

The main wrapper will look something like this:

 
  [...]

 

 

       
       
       
 

Edit the template so that you get this:

 
  [...]

 
 
      

       
       
       
     

Basically, move the end if tag below the end /section.
Instead of the old if tag, replace it with an else/ statement belo the end of the #featured section.

Oh and you should probably increase the number of characters displayed. Amanda hast set the number "numchars = 200". Why not tripeling that number?

We switched to Nexus5 as a template

and here are the minutes of what we did.

Follow the instructions of Amanda (Bloggerbuster.com), who has designed the Nexus5 template.

1. Be sure, that you create a backup of your old blogger template, including the widgets.
2. Download the template | Unzip it | Upload the Nexus5 template
3. Setup the menu bar using the Nexus 5 linklist tool in Layout - Page Elements section of blogger
4. Upload a logo
5. Change the colours

So far so good. Now we do some stripping getting rid of the blog style elements.
Amanda has added "author name" code, that can't be manipulated when removing the blog elements using the Layout - Page Elements - Blog posts tool. So we have to get rid of the following code (best search for "address class" on the page).

We also need to move the post teasers to the left. Amanda has set this as 200px positioned from the left. We simply will set that to nill or to remove the CSS variable declaration. Best, use the browser page search to find "200px".

To finish polishing our firt Nexus5 adaption, we need to edit a few setting in the Page Element section, especially regarding the link list and the categories.