When you change your background color, be sure to set text colors for the A:link section at the top of the page. This sets the colors for clickable links on the page... if not, clickable links on the Pages: and the navigation bar will be very hard to read.

Also, you should set a default "color:" in the BODY area at the top. This is the default color for any text on the page that is not set anywhere else.

Bottom line: if the Navigation bar or Pages: section at the bottom of your blog are not visible or hard to read (you will only have a Pages: section if you have mroe than 5 posts), then you need to set "color:" in the BODY area at the top, and set your A:link colors near the top of the page to something opposite of your background color. If your background color is dark, use a lighter color and vice versa.

The Clean feature may cause some confusion for you the way it currently works... if you are having problems seeing blog palette changes, go to your blog page and see if "Clean!" is set -- if so you will see an exclamation point next to it. If so, click Clean! once and it should go away.

Now go make changes to your blog...

The confusion comes in if it is set, and you go to view your "Work" palette -- and then try to click clean to turn it off. It switches you to your live palette so you wont see any changes and it will confuse you.

I'll have to work to clarify that.

Also, the feature under the Options tag that says "Show in default mode" or something like that is really the same thing as the Clean feature, and that line does NOT currently show an exclamation point. I'll have to fix that as well.

Sorry for the additional confusion.

If you change your background from light to dark, make sure to change any text that is on that background from dark to light. If you don't, your blog will be hard for people to read. If your blog is hard for people to read, people will stop reading it...

You should be careful to not put your blog template live until it is fully ready, as you don't want to turn off possible visitors.

Every item of text has an area where you can change the color, just browse through the Palette file. There are also some earlier posts in this blog that explain how to locate and change font colors.

In general, use light text on dark backgrounds, and dark text on light backgrounds. Try subtle changes first -- if the default blog is light colored and you like blue, try using a light blue first to get your feet wet.

Also, don't forget that not everyone has the same tastes as you... so while a blog is a way to express yourself, if your goal is to reach as many people as possible, you have to compromise sometimes.

Here are some examples of proper light/dark balance (assuming these members have not changed their blogs since):

http://laurelcrowned.blogstream.com/

http://goneforever.blogstream.com/

http://dearmrpresident.blogstream.com/

http://shortales.blogstream.com/

Let's look at an example. If you edit your work palette you will see a line similar to this one:

.blog_title_text { font-size: 30px; color: DARKBLUE; }

This is the section where you can change the text which displays your blog title.

The only things you want to change are the items inside the {} symbols, do not change anything else. Let's take a look at each piece:

font-size: 30px;

This specifies that the font size should be 30px, which is a slightly larger font. A stanard font size is "16px". The lower the number, the smaller the font size. Whatever font size you choose, be sure to just change the number (do not remove the px;).

color: DARKBLUE;

This specifies we want the font size to be dark blue, a preset color value. We could also do this:

color: #000077;

Which is an advanced way of specifying dark blue (see my earlier blog post).

There are other tags you can place here (which are not shown in this example) such as:

font-weight: normal;
font-weight: bold;

This specifies how "heavy" the font is. Normal is the default, bold will make the text stand out more.

font-family: Arial;
font-family: Arial, Times, Courier, "Lucida Console", Verdana, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;

This specifies the font to use. The first font that is available will be used. In the first example, we only specify one font, Arial. If the visitors computer has the Arial font on their computer it will be used, otherwise the system default font will be used instead. In the second example, we specify other fonts that can be used in case Arial is not available (in order of preference).

So let's make some changes to the blog title area. Here is our original line:

.blog_title_text { font-size: 30px; color: DARKBLUE; }

Let's replace it with:

.blog_title_text {
font-size: 40px;
color: DARKRED;
font-family: Times, Arial;
font-weight: bold;
}

This will make your blog title bigger, (40px instead of 30px), Dark Red instead of Dark Blue in color, "Bold", and it will show in "Times" font if available, or else it will default to Arial.

Yes... you can specify an image anywhere you would specify a background color. Whenever you see a line like this (with any color specified):

background-color: WHITE;

You can replace it with:

background-image: url('http://www.somesitename.com/image.jpg');

You may notice that a background-image line already exists in your palette file but it is commented out with /* and */. You can remove those comments (see the other post in this blog regarding comments) and specify a image url.

You must have your background image stored on the Internet somewhere, such as an image hosting service or in your Blogstream gallery.

There are some great websites for finding Gallery images. A few are listed below, but please make sure to read the rules (usually "Terms") on any site you visit to make sure you are using the images properly and within the rules.

Background City - You can use these images for free, but you must copy the image to another webserver (you cannot link to their website directly) and you must place a link in your blog mentioning you use them.

Free Background Images - Same here, you need to put a link back to their site and copy the image to another location.

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If you do not have any other place on the web to store your background image, you can store it in your Blogstream gallery. After uploading the image to your gallery, view your gallery and click on the "URL" link under the image. This will tell you the URL to use to refer to your image. (Unfortunately you will have to copy it manually at this time... we are working on a way to fix that.)