Google announced on their blog today that their Blogger Template Designer is now available for everyone to use. It has been in “Draft” since March, meaning you could sign up to play around with the template designer but it is now available to everyone by default.
If you haven’t heard of it before, Blogger is a blogging platform that’s free to use and a very easy way to have a blog up and running in minutes. It’s probably fair to say it doesn’t have the same level of community support or features as Wordpress, but it’s not a bad starting point from which to jump into the world of blogging.
The Blogger Template Designer allows anyone to customize the look and layout of their Blogger blog. The post on the Blogger Buzz blog lists the new features, which include:
- 19 new starting templates, with more to come.
- All designs are CSS based, but there is no requirement to know CSS or HTML.
- All complexity is hidden from the user, they just pick colors, fonts, backgrounds
- Blogger have collaborated with iStockphoto to offer hundreds of background images for free.
- A single control to change all your design’s colors.
- A real-time preview sits below the design control panel.
- Advanced users can write their own CSS and override a template design’s CSS.
- Cross-browser support with Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. (I didn’t see any mention of Safari)
You can try out and play around with the Template Designer here and can apply the design to a new or existing blog. The editing control panel is simple with four sections Templates, Background, Layout and Advanced where the user can make changes.
Under the editing control panel, users can see how the changes affect their blog in real time.
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