Moment of Sheer Panic

I very nearly just inhaled my own spleen. I doubt its physically possible under normal circumstances but I swear my organs have switched positions in the last half hour, so you never know.

A couple of days ago I discovered a nifty little template generator. I won't give you a link until I am absolutely certain I know how to work it, because trust me, you want your organs to stay in the same place as they were this morning. It was fabulous on the surface - you can neatly box things off in your sidebars, it was three column (a must for me), I could finally (and easily) add a custom header...

The generator is a lovely little point-and-click deal (absolutely essential for me) and in theory, the code it spits out for you at the end should slip seamlessly and effortlessly into the HTML editor of your blog.

Excuse me for a moment while I hyperventilate into a paper bag. The trauma is coming back.

Ahem.

I have a dummy blog I use regularly for stuff like this so that's no problem. At first I couldn't get the code to work. Blogger was coming up with an error message saying I needed to insert a "<" somewhere, or find the flux capacitor. Or something. It was all going over my head. New blog-friend Tina from Mummified Times Five, God rest her bloggityville soul, kindly sent me the code from HER blog (she used the same template generator) so I could possibly (like in four thousand years from now) figure out a way to sub my customisations into her code.

HA!

It was only then that I wondered if the template generator's website had a help menu.

Funnily enough, someone else had had this problem. The author mentioned that the generator was designed for the old Blogger (Beta) so converting to 'Classic View' (a simple link click at the bottom of the code box on the 'Edit HTML' page) would give better results.

And it worked. It honest to goodness worked. I had a pretty country background, centred header, neat little boxes for all my sidebar related stuff. I was looking at my dummy blog and swooning, it was that good. The funniest thing is, you probably think I'm joking. I was not.

And alas, pride comes before a fall...

So with the wonderful success on the dummy blog, I was feeling about ten feet tall, so I moseyed on over to my REAL. LIVE. BLOG. and into the HTML editor to copy in the same code.

For gosh-knows what reason, the lovely design I'd come up with looked mostly okay but a column was out of alignment. That's no problem, I could fix that - eventually. Then whenever I clicked on a link, I reverted back to 'Scribe' 2-column (ie, boring as dishwater, standard Blogger) format. The pretty new design didn't transfer over to any of the other pages!

That's right about the point the panic set in.

Until I remembered (thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you) that I'd downloaded the original Lizzie's Home template code first. And here we are back again, if not physically scarred then definitely mentally so, breathing (mostly) normally again.

I have never been more thankful in my life that I stopped to download my template first. Let this serve as a lesson:

1. Set up a dummy blog. Right. This. Second.
2. ALWAYS download your template in full before changing the HTML. Because if you don't, then I'll feel responsible and after today, I don't ever want to see another piece of HTML code that isn't pre-tested and gift-wrapped. Ever again.

So, three questions for you all:

1. Does anyone know of any user-friendly (ie, no HTML knowledge necessary) blog template generators out there?

and...

2. If I went to a professional, what would be the going rate for an entire blog re-do? Because that's how addicted I am to blogging. And I know how sad that sounds.

and...

3. There is no number three. I'm too traumatized, LOL.

Cheers,
Lizzie