I had a question emailed to me about how I did the layout of this blog, so I thought I'd put it all together here.
The main question was in regards to how I created my menu bar up at the top of my page. There are two main ways you can do this, and which one you choose will depend on what you want out of it. You can create a toolbar through labels, which is ideal if you want to have a toolbar that links to posts on a certain subject on your blog or if you have subjects that you will be updating and adding to as you go (i.e. Christmas posts, sewing posts, etc). You can also create a toolbar through pages, which is ideal if you have a single post or piece of information that you want to be easily accessible (like an about me, contact me, or information page).
Okay...let's first cover creating a toolbar through creating labels.
With each post that you write you can assign a label to it; you can even assign multiple labels to one single post. There are two different ways to do this.
Creating and assigning labels:
1.When you are writing your posts, there is a section in the toolbar to the right where you can type in the labels you want. It looks like this:
You can type in whatever labels you want there in that text box in the toolbar, just separate each label with a comma. Once you have labeled a post, that label is saved in the system and all you have to do is click on the label below the text box and it will apply it to the post.
2. If you already have posts written up that you want to apply labels to, you can either go in and edit the post and assign labels as we did above, or you can assign them from your posts screen. To get to the posts screen from your Blogger Dashboard (usually what you see when you log in to Blogger), click on your blog name.
The click on "Posts" in the left toolbar.
Then select the post you want to label and click the little label icon in the buttons right above the posts (in the screenshot below it's right next to the "Publish" and "Revert to Draft" buttons).
And then you can either apply a label you already created, or you can select "New label..." and create a new label right there. Be sure to deselect the post after you are done labeling it.
Creating the Labels Toolbar
Once you have labels created, you then need to add the label gadget to the top of your blog to create that toolbar you're going for. This type of toolbar is good if you want to have an easy link to all the posts you did on a certain subject, and if it is a label that you plan to add to as you go along with your blog. Here's how to do that:
Open up your blog and click on the Layout button in the left toolbar.
This will generally be what the layout page looks like (everyone's will be slightly different depending on their content and organization). If you look in the screenshot below, you'll see the large white box labeled "Blog Posts", and the column of smaller boxes to the right. At the top of that right sidebar is a link that says "Add a Gadget". Click that.
A box will appear with all sorts of nifty gadgets that you can add to your blog. You'll have to scroll down a ways until you find the Labels gadget.
When you click on the Labels gadget, the "Configure Labels" box will appear. You can leave the title as labels or change it to whatever you want it to be. I changed mine to Holidays. This window is where you get to decide which labels you want to show on your blog. You can have one list of all the labels on your blog, one list of selected labels, or multiple lists of selected labels. Let's say that I wanted to make a labels list of just the holiday labels I have. The second line in the box lets you choose between showing "All Labels" or "Selected Labels". I only want the holiday ones and not all the labels, so I'd select "Selected Labels".
You'll then have to scroll down in the box and your label list will appear. Now you already need to have your labels created at this point, you can't add labels in this box. I hit the "Select none" button so I didn't have to go through and manually deselect all 39 labels, and then I went back and selected the holiday labels I wanted. After selecting the labels you want, hit "Done" beneath the label selections first and
then hit the orange Save button.
Your new labels gadget then shows up at the top of your gadget list.
Now you can leave your labels on the side bar or you can move them up to the top of your blog. If you want to move them you simply click, hold, and drag the label to the top. You may have to move it around slightly until the dotted box appears where you want the labels to be.
Once it is in place, hit "Save Arrangement" in the top toolbar and go check out your new labels toolbar!
Now every time you create a post that has that label, it will automatically be linked to those tabs.
On my blog I choose to have the labels in my right sidebar rather than up at the top since I have many labels.
Now let's cover creating a toolbar through creating pages.
Open up your dashboard and click on your blog's name.
Then click the "Pages" button on the left toolbar.
This is where you can create one single page that you probably won't be updating often. To create a new page, click "New Page" and type in your content (the window looks quite similar to when you create a new blog post). After you have your page contents all typed up and saved, return to this screen. You can then choose where you want the pages toolbar to appear on your blog. There on the left in the screenshot below you can see the button that says "Show pages as Top Tabs". Click that.
You then can choose to have the toolbar show at the top of your blog, on the side, or not to show at all so you can just link to them from posts.
I have my pages set up so they appear at the top of my blog:
So there are two methods you can use to create toolbars on your blog. It is a nice way to keep your blog organized and to make it easy for people to find the information they are looking for.
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