Thursday, February 21, 2013

Add A Fixed Navigation Bar for Blogger (Blogspot)



Many bloggers using the free platform blogger.com to blog about their passion, services or products. Since blogger.com doesn't come with a fixed navigation bar, many blogs don't have a navbar to help readers easily find what they want to read in the blogs. This may hinder the readers engagement with the website.
As a blogger myself, I would prefer to have readers staying on my blog, reading as many articles as possible, so help them to find what they need with a beautiful navigation bar is a must for me.

Below I am going to show you how everyone can easily add a fixed navbar for your blog with blogger.com.

I am going to break up this tutorial into several posts to demonstrate how to achieve this.

After each post, choose "labels" under the "Post settings" on the right side of the screen, type in keywords for each article. Bear in mind that in order to group articles under different tabs on the navbar, use the same keyword to group same topic articles.
I'm going to use "Step 1" as the first tab on my navbar, so I include the words "Step 1" in my labels.

In order to create a navigation bar, choose "layout" on the dashboard screen. There is a "Navbar" section on the screen. But it is useless for navigation within a blog, so ignore this.
Choose "Add a Gadget" under the Header section.
Scroll down the list of gadget to find "labels" to add.
Then this pop up window will show.

Remove the title name to leave it blank.
Select "selected labels". Use "edit' to choose the labels you need for navigation bar.
For sorting the labels, use "Alphabetically", therefore when you decide what label name to use for each  groups, choose wisely so that your labels could be grouped in alphabetical order and still can be presented in a way you desire.
Untick "Show number of posts per label". Then save.

Whenever there is a new article to post, choose to group it under which tab by using the exact label for the article.
For adding new tabs on the navbar, add new labels and repeat the three steps describe above.

Please leave your comments below.