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Veteran blog readers notice that Weblogs have a characteristic appearance,beginning with the date headers, which indicate the blog’s chronology. Also, blog services provide a few templates used by thousands of sites, so many of those blogs resemble each other. These templates are page designs that make the site attractive with no work on your part. Without templates, Web site designers spend hours, days, and weeks creating the content spaces and navigation sidebars that make up a typical Web page. With prebuilt templates, you just select a site design and start blogging.
Templates not only define the colors of your pages but sometimes also determine how your archives are presented, the format of your date and time stamp, and other details that affect your visitors’ experience. These details are sometimes configurable, and personalizing them is a worthwhile effort.
The existence of templates doesn’t mean that you can’t tweak, or even completely reimagine, the design of your blog. Some blog platforms allow total personalization, but starting from scratch is challenging. Most beginners (and, really, all those who prefer creating content to creating design) prefer preconfigured design choices. And because many users of popular blog services don’t even bother exploring all the available template choices, the topdesigns are commonly used.
If you care about your site looking different from thousands of others, dig deep into the menu of templates. In many cases, the template can be changed in midstream; when you do that, every page of your blog is changed over to the new design.
Your main choice is whether to host the blog yourself or have a blog company do it. By “host,” I don’t mean “write.” You’ll be the one writing your blog no matter where it lives. The hosting decision is about whether you install the blog software or use a service with the software already running. Most people choose the latter because it’s easier. Adventurous and technically inclined people choose the self-installed options because they are more powerful.