5 FREE Blogger Themes for your firm's website

So you decided to set up a website for your office and chose Blogger as the "engine" to deliver your content? Today I bring you 5 free themes that can be used on your website, and I'm going to show you step by step how to install one of them.

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If you followed our previous content, we showed you how can you build a professional website without programming and, among the available options, a platform that I consider very good to build a "portfolio site", that is, a site that brings content that can be ranked and gives you great exposure over time by attracting more internet visitors, is Blogger.

Still don't have your professional website? See our blog post here on how to do this, along with the video we posted teaching you this step-by-step:

In my previous content, I mentioned that the main feature for success is content, and that you can use the default Blogger theme at an early start without any problems. However, I know the default theme is pretty ugly, so I'm going to show you how to set up and install custom themes for free (although there are some paid options for that additional “punch”). 

To find free Blogger themes is pretty easy: you can do a Google search for "free blogger templates" and many sites will come up with different templates that can be used on the platform. You'll find theme templates for photo sites, product sales, sports, news, and more.

"Free blogger templates" will bring you a lot of options right away

In this post, I'm going to focus on themes that I found and that I understand are interesting for you to present your content in the form of articles, as that's what I imagine a "portfolio" site should do to get more exposure. So let's go to some suggestions for Blogger themes on your firm's website:

5 FREE BLOGGER THEMES

Below you will find some interesting themes that I found on the Internet that can be used on Blogger to customize your professional portfolio site a little bit. In the name of each theme I made a link to the respective page if you want to read more or find instructions on installing and customizing them on Blogger, or if you want to purchase the paid version of the template (they offer the free version but the paid version gives more benefits, such as removing the credits in the footer).

1. POLAR

A very "clean" theme, with a main featured post, followed by two other minor highlights and finally the post list. It works well for you to have the most recent material you produce right on the cover.

I like this theme because it's basically composed of white and gray lines, which makes the look very focused on the content itself: if you use this theme, take care of the photos in the posts for a better result.

DEMO ONLINE DOWNLOAD

2. KATE

This theme has a very professional feel, with a very eye-catching "above the fold" portion, which allows you to leave your value proposition and a call to action right away. You can, for example, put a catchy title and subtitle for what you offer as services and a call to action, for example, to get in touch with you via WhatsApp. 

In addition to the "above the fold" content, this theme is very visual to present the other articles written, which helps a lot to give a nice look if the photos of your content are well produced.

DEMO ONLINE DOWNLOAD

3. TECHY

This theme has a great initial presentation in terms of post highlights: a giant banner crosses the page right at the opening, which is great for capturing the interest of those who visit the page. From the image below, it is possible to associate this type of site more with technology and games pages, for example, but it should serve your content very well. 

As with the previous models, a good visual presentation for each of your articles is very important, as they are the call for the reader to access the content.

DEMO ONLINE DOWNLOAD

4. PHOTONIC

What if your portfolio site was almost an Instagram feed? This theme totally focuses on the photos of your posts: if your photo production is excellent, you can leave an article with a sensational photo and, when clicking on the photo, the visitor is directed to your post.

This theme is very visually pleasing, and will make your website look much more relaxed and eye-catching.

DEMO ONLINE DOWNLOAD

5. RIPPLE

Minimalist. With this theme you basically have a nice way to maintain a Blog, which might be what you want for your portfolio site. With a large photo for each article and an opening snippet of what you've written, you can captivate your visitor and lead them to the content page without too many distractions.

DEMO ONLINE DOWNLOAD

INSTALLING A CUSTOMIZED THEME ON BLOGGER

And now let's install one of the themes, to show you in practice how it works. 😁 

As a general rule, each theme has its peculiarities and may need specific adjustments to work 100%. In the links I left above, most of them take you to the page with the theme's documentation, where they are explained step by step what should be done inside Blogger and necessary adjustments to make the theme work properly. 

Let's take a theme here and apply it to our website made earlier. For this article, we're going to use the last one on our list here, Ripple, for a more minimalist look. 

First, download the free theme and unzip it to a folder on your computer. Once unzipped, you will see an XML file in the theme folder -- this file is the Blogger theme.

This XML file is the Blogger theme

To install the theme, you will need to go to your Blogger dashboard, click on Themes, on the arrow under the "Customize" button, and finally on Restore.

Then, just upload the XML file you downloaded, and the theme will be applied. If you access the blog at this point, you will notice that it already has the new theme, but it still gives a clear impression that there is something "missing".


That's because we're not done yet -- we'll need to make the necessary adjustments to get the theme applied correctly. There are usually more detailed instructions on the theme's download page for you to customize your theme. You can follow the instructions on each of the "Online Demo" links that we linked above and you will see that there are installation and configuration instructions.


In our case, we have an instruction file along with the file we downloaded from Ripple, in the "Documentation" folder. When opening the file, however, we notice that it is in a slightly different language (Indonesian?) but it is possible to know what to change.

To change the relevant sections, let's change the HTML in Blogger by clicking the down arrow on the Customize button on the Theme tab, and finally Edit HTML.

What we are going to change based on this documentation, which will need to be looked up in the HTML code: 

Top navigation menus, replacing links with Blogger pages that we actually have or other links of interest:

Meta data on the document, which helps in content detection and page ranking, in which we will exchange information to put our details:

Contact information, which highlights our profile and provides an easy way for your visitor to contact you:

To make the theme easier to see, I've also published an post: this allows us to better see what the contents will look like once published. 

Now, let's change the layout we came up with via the "Layout" menu: Once on the screen, you can change the title of some sections and configure other important sections, like defining a header image, for example. We can also delete sections and "widgets" that we don't want, to make the page better suited to our needs.

You can customize various sections of your theme here

Finally, we can make some changes to our layout directly in the HTML code, giving some final tweaks to what we want as a page. In this case, I changed the style of the search field a little, which is now above the profile photo and contacts. So our layout became a little more presentable:

It's still not perfect, but it's presentable.

I'll leave the XML code for this layout on GitHub with the adjustments I made, in case you're interested. To see the styles I used in the search field, search the HTML for /* OCTAVIO SEARCHBAR */

And with that, you can now put a custom theme on your Blogger portfolio site and have a more presentable professional website, without spending anything. 😀

Once your site is live, you can gradually refine its details, improve images and add additional widgets. If you still think it's worth it, you can buy a professional theme on the Internet and implement it the same way we've done here (on this site there are some really cool ones to sell and some for free too: https://themeforest.net/category/blogging/blogger)

/* End of the post, see you next time */