How can I customize my blog design more effectively?

[Emerald-Design]

Hello. I am wondering if there is a way to customize my blog more. Can I purchase a template that allows me to modify layout, margins, picture sizes etc. Currently My blog preview photo shows up giant at the beginning of the blog and looks terrible. I cant even see anywhere in the code that controls the photo. I think the blog looks very basic and unprofessional.

Can you buy just one blog template or even the code for a blog template. I know how to add an alternate blog style but I do not know enough code to build my own blog template. Everything I see on the app store wants $20-$40 every month for a blog template? That seems crazy. What am I missing here?

This is my website blog page: https://emeraldedesign.com/blogs/news

TIA!

[Ninthony]

I don't know of any template code you can pre buy, but if you have an idea of what you want your blogs to look like you can mock something up and have a developer make a new template for you. If you want to give it a shot yourself, you're probably going to want to be editing article.liquid in your templates folder.

[Emerald-Design]

Thank you for your response. Why would I use liquid as opposed to .json?

[Ninthony]

Ah, I didn't realize you're working on a 2.0 theme. In that case you'd be looking in article.json. In that file you'd be looking for what section it's using. In Dawn theme you can see the section is called "main-article.liquid" -- it'll be in your sections folder:

[Emerald-Design]

Thank you. Yes I created a blog alternate here. But I don't have enough code knowledge to fill it with proper code to customize the blog 🙂 I am not sure where to go from here.

[Ninthony]

Well what is it exactly you're looking to do? I can guide you into making some changes.