Most hosted blogging platforms offer their customers a set of standard templates with relatively few options for customizing these sites. Starting today, however, bloggers on Google’s Blogger platform will be able to take full control over the layout of their sites thanks to Google’s new Blogger Template Designer without having to edit a single line of HTML and CSS code. The Template Designer will give Blogger’s users the ability to change the layout, fonts, colors and background images of their blogs through an easy to use WYSIWYG editor.
For now, the Template Designer will only be available through Blogger in Draft, Google’s experimental section for new Blogger features.
Features
Every template allows users to choose different body layouts with up to four columns. Google partnered with iStockphoto to bring more background images to Blogger. For now, Google won’t allow users to upload their own background images yet, but advanced users can always use the CSS code to point to their own images.
In the template designer, users can also change the size and number of the columns on their blogs and edit the design of their blogs’ footers.
Change your Color Palette With One Slider
One of the niftiest new features in the Template Designer involves the option to change the complete color palette of your blog with one simple slider. Based on your choice, the application will simply set all the colors of the fonts and other design elements on your site based on your preference while still ensuring readability.
As Siobhan Quinn, Google’s product manager for Blogger told us yesterday, Google’s users really want to be able to customize their sites and make them look as unique as possible. Just offering a set of rigid templates, Quinn noted, simply isn’t enough to give users the feeling that a site is truly theirs. Until now, customizing Blogger sites – while possible – was a bit of a hassle and making any major changed involved editing the HTML and CSS code by hand, which a lot of Blogger’s users weren’t quite ready to do.
Other blogging platforms like WordPress.com and TypePad and also allow their users to individualize their blogs to some degree. On WordPress, however, editing the CSS code comes at a price ($15/year) and unless you are an advanced user, changing the layout of your blog on most hosted blogging platforms is going to involve a steep learning curve.
According to Google, Blogger currently has over 300 million active users and more than 388 million words are published on Blogger every day.
