IF you've swung by my blog anytime in the past fortnight you'll have noticed I've been tinkering with my blog header and social media buttons. It's been more than three years since I started my blog and I haven't changed things much. Sure, my pics got bigger, I dabble with how to load my pictures and the blog roll changes but I haven't invested a lot of time in the blog's design, mostly because I liked what I had, and you can see I haven't strayed far from it. The header's hand-drawn and sans any Illustrator, Flash or other Adobe suite bells and whistles, and I reckon it says a lot about my blog. It's just a little splash of creativity. It toddles along beside bloggers marketing their handmade wares and others with an opinion much more weighty than mine. I don't have any wares to market and you can take or leave my opinion, Lord knows most around me do.

Anyhoot, the exercise has had me thinking how other bloggers decided upon their blog names and how their blogs looked. I wondered whether they'd agonised over a name, or wrestled with the templates available to them and what they'd loved or hated and changed as time went by.

So, I asked them. Just a handful. I asked how they'd chosen their blog name, whether they'd designed their own blog header, and what the process had been, and whether they had any design tips for fellow bloggers.

As their answers arrive, I'll share them with you.

As for me, the blog name and the images in the header come from a story I read to my four stepchildren when they were little. I don't have the book I read it from anymore but a rough translation is on Wikipedia, derived, as is the picture above, from the 1890 book English Fairy Tales, by Joseph Jacobs.

When little, the children - based on an evening of mirth where none of us could utter the word "Crackernuts" without dissolving into giggles - nicknamed me Crackers. To this day my partner will use it as a term of endearment and it's even the chosen "grandmother" title I am to bear when the children have little ones of their own.

Nana Crackers. I'm sure to be a hit among the Bingo set *winks*.