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19 June 2010

Blogger Launches New Template Designer

FRESH NEW TEMPLATE DESIGNER FOR BLOGGERS

Blogger has continued to roll out a series of impressive 'constructive changes' to their platform. When the company, a Google subsidiary, first launched its Template Designer to Blogger in Draft in March 2010, bloggers across the world gave a lot of feedback and made countless suggestions.

Blogger.com

Blogger Announces Change, Receive Feedback

The initial official Blogger post received nearly 1,000 comments and many bloggers shared their blog’s new looks on Twitter using the now popular hash tag, #newbloggertemplate.

All the feedback and suggestions helped Blogger fix many bugs and add more themes and background images. But the Blogger Template Designer was then available to Blogger-in-Draft users only as a beta release.

Now however, Blogger has just announced that it has finally released the Blogger Template Designer to everyone. Here the official announcement:
When we launched the Blogger Template Designer to Blogger in Draft in March, you gave us a lot of feedback and suggestions. Our blog post received nearly 1,000 comments and many of you shared your blog’s new looks on Twitter using #newbloggertemplate. Since the launch, we fixed many bugs and added even more themes and background images. But the Blogger Template Designer has only been available on Blogger in Draft, which is why we’re excited to announce that the Blogger Template Designer is now available to everyone.

Highlights Of The New Template Designer

Bloggers across the world on every platform (including www.blogger.com) want their blogs to look unique. Below is a short 1 - 2 minute video introducing the fabulous new Template Designer.



With the new Blogger Template Designer, you can create your own blog designs through:
  • Beautiful new templates. Blogger has designed 19 brand-new templates, with more on the way. You can quickly give your blog a great new style by selecting one of the new templates - see [1] below.
  • Separating design from layout. Designs are completely defined in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), meaning that any design can be applied to any blog layout, making templates more flexible and unique.
  • Hundreds of free, professional background images. Blogger has paired up with iStockphoto to offer bloggers hundreds of gorgeous background images at no cost.
  • A single control to change all your design's colors. With other platforms, users have to define every color in their blog separately, making changing the color theme of your blog a tedious task. The Blogger Template Designer lets you change all the colors in your blog at once, by changing the Main color theme.
  • Pixel-perfect layout manipulation via smooth resizing. You can define your layout down to the pixel via sliders that update the blog's preview in real time.
  • A real-time preview sits below the design control panel. Watch your blog update as you create your template design.
  • Keeping it simple. Throughout the Template Designer Blogger uses hierarchy to hide complexity from you.
  • Complete control. Under the advanced tab, you can override a design's CSS and enter your own CSS in the editor and see your blog's preview updated in real time.
  • Cross-browser support. Blogger handles cross browser support for you, so you don’t have to. Want a design with rounded corners? Blogger gives it to you in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.

Trying Out The New Template Designer!

With all the highlights of the Template Designer outlined above, bloggers on the Blogger platform are in for an exciting time.

Anyone can try out the new Template Designer here. If you like your design, you can apply it to a new blog or to an existing blog.

You can also try the Template Designer on your blog. Just log into your Blogger.com account and go to: Design >> Template Designer.

Note: Selecting a new template will erase all of your customizations on the existing template, so if you have previously customized your template be sure to first save the current template.

Keep enjoying!

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