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Blogger Rolls Out New Template Designer

Blogger Rolls Out New Template Designer

I’ve never understood Blogger. In my humble opinion, it is a cumbersome blogging platform that has always dragged way behind the competition. Even under the Google umbrella, the novice CMS has failed to impress. But perhaps there is hope…

Starting today, Blogger is rolling out the Blogger Template Designer, a tool that will give users much greater control over how their blog looks and operates.

New professional designs, full color control, stock photo backgrounds and HTML/CSS implementation open up the door to the best looking Blogger blogs to date.

The feature can currently be accessed at Blogger’s beta test lab.

Blogger was revolutionary when it launched last century but has failed to win the hearts of many regular bloggers. Miraculously, however, Google claims the number of users has doubled over the past two years. If it weren’t for the strong reaction to Blogger’s recent abandonment of FTP support, I would not have believed them.

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This could be the biggest enhancement to Blogger in over a decade, and while it’s an improvement, I would have liked to see the feature released with more than 15 templates.

What’s your take? Is Blogger worth another look?

View Comments (12)
  • Andrew, got to agree with you on the Blogger platform.
    I personally feel that it has some way to go; yes it has some nice features, but there are other, better platforms out there.

  • I’m on Blogger and it’s unbelievable how behind they are. They just created the option to have pages, such as about, contact, etc without having to make it a post.

    I tried WordPress and was lost. I’ll probably end up using WordPress because of the features.

  • If you have a slow Net connection you notice that the much simpler dashboard of Blogger loads way faster than the WordPress dashboard.

    Much of what Blogger are now offering was available before if you new xhtml and css, but the new dashboard makes it much easier to tweak things than before.

    And if you want to do anything commercial with your blog WordPress.com is extremely restrictive in what they will allow, unlike Blogger where you can pretty much do what you want in terms of ads and affiliates.

    Given that it is free I would expect to see Blogger pick up far more new customers and slow, if not stop, the loss of customers to WordPress that has been occurring over the last year or so.

  • Okay, just used it and I’m not impressed There are four basic templates and within those templates you can change the colors and layouts. I like the ease of changing the layout but not only having four templates.

    It would be nice if you could load your own template and still have the ease of changing the layout and colors with a click of a button, instead of searching for the code.

  • I haven’t use Blogger in years, but maybe I should look at it again. However, would it kill them to have more than 15 templates. What I used to hate about Blogger is that it all looked the same no matter what.

    I still think Blogger has a lot of catching up to do if they want to be put on the same map as WordPress.

  • There are thousands of different templates for Blogger, take a look at http://btemplates.com/ for example. For me, Blogger is the best free hosted platform for blogging. Everything that is important, Blogger does, but some features need to change the html.

  • When I imported my Blogger Blog to WordPress I noticed that it was filled with Broken Links maybe Beta Blogger could make something like a Broken link checker for Blogger. This is one Reason why I have no time for Blogger because it offers little in the way of Site structure meaning you loose out in search

  • Reason why I have no time for Blogger because it offers little in the way of Site structure meaning you loose out in search

  • I am still a wordpress fan. I started blogging with blogger but after using wordpress, it is very hard to use back blogger platform.

    As a whole, I feel that there are more control when using wordpress, it has various plugins that I can use which is pretty similar to the idea of iphone apps that iphone user can use.

    However, I am going to try this new blogger features to check it out. Thks

  • I’m new in this blogging world. Barely a week since I started. My first encounter was with Blogger. For a complete noob, Blogger was very easy to work with. So, I think I’m stick with Blogger since it serve me just fine right now.

    Cheers,
    Pam

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