Finally, a Major New Reason to Use Blogger: Easy Custom Templates

By  |  Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 10:00 am

At this point, blogging has been around so long that there’s nothing extraordinary about almost anyone–from an eleven-year-old to a grandma–having his or her own blog. One basic thing about blogging, however, remains surprisingly tough: gaining control over a blog’s look and feel. Automattic’s WordPress.com, Google’s Blogger, and Six Apart’s TypePad all provide plenty of off-the-shelf themes, but no simple way to create a truly unique skin for your blog.

Now Blogger–a venerable service that hasn’t changed much in eons–is doing something about it. It’s using its Blogger in Draft lab site to launch an ambitious template designer that provides point-and-click control over elements like colors, images, and layout. You can start with a canned theme, use the editor, and end up with one that’s unique to your Blogger blog.

So far, I’ve only seen the template designer in screen-image form–you can see some example shots after the jump–rather than getting hands-on experience. But it looks like a neat idea that could be a major new reason to consider using Blogger when you create a blog. It also looks at least a little like the customization options at SquareSpace, a less well-known blogging platform that emphasizes a blend of powerful features with a simple interface.

(UPDATE: Now that the template editor is live, I tried it. It is indeed nifty, especially in the way you see a live preview of the template as you change colors, fonts, and layouts. Wish every blogging platform had something like this.)

Blogger’s template designer will be available to all Blogger users today as an opt-in offering with fifteen starter templates; Blogger product manager Siobhan Quinn told me that Google wants to roll it out as a default feature as soon as possible, and that the final version will offer additional customizable versions of existing Blogger themes.

Here’s Blogger’s post on the new feature.

 
12 Comments


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8 Comments For This Post

  1. apphackers Says:
    March 11th, 2010 at 10:26 am

    Here’s a big reason not to use Blogger: Their stupid comment system that shows comments in a popup or an ugly non-themed page.

  2. Ananth Says:
    March 11th, 2010 at 11:00 am

    thanks for the news.. I was waiting for this.

  3. Luke Says:
    March 11th, 2010 at 11:12 am

    If I were SquareSpace I would start working on a new business model….

  4. Ananth Says:
    March 11th, 2010 at 11:41 am

    Now I am not able to see comments or add new comments on my site 🙁

  5. John Says:
    March 11th, 2010 at 12:44 pm

    @apphackers: Blogger lets you display the comments inline on the blog post pages rather than on a separate page. It’s the default setting when you create a new blog. You can also use many third party commenting systems; you pretty much have complete freedom.

  6. apphackers Says:
    March 11th, 2010 at 5:00 pm

    @John well for some reason or other most Blogger bloggers don’t use that feature so I always dread it when I see a blogspot blog.

  7. Rav Casley Gera Says:
    March 17th, 2010 at 3:03 am

    Regrettably to balance this out they’ve taken away the option to use Blogger to power a totally self-designed FTP site. I’m sure they’re being honest when they say very few people were using it, though.

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