The Blogger Team has announced the Blogger Template Designer. The Blogger Template Designer will allow free bloggers greater customization of their blog templates (which dictate the presentation of the blogs) without knowing HTML or CSS.

The Blogger Team states:

The Blogger Template Designer allows you to create effectively infinite number of designs templates instead of being restricted to a limited number of rigid designs by making it easy to customize your blogs design, layout, background and much more. — The Blogger Team.

 

Features of The Blogger Template Designer:

• Beautiful new starting templates
• Choices of blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• You can now select from hundreds of background images
• Colors, fonts, and other parts of the free blog can be customized

Here is a video released by Blogger about the new Blogger Template Designer:

For too long the template choices at Blogger have been in need of updating. If you were capable with HTML and CSS, then Blogger did allow you to tweak your blog template as desired, and some were able to design their own unique Blogger templates. Overall though, most free Blogger bloggers stuck to the default and common template offerings. The end result was that for too long, too many free Blogger blogs looked like too many other free Blogger blogs. Free blogs with the same looks just kept getting stamped out one by one.

The new Blogger Template Designer is a step in the right direction for Blogger. However, if you want to have complete control over your blog the best solution is still to Own Your Own Blog by self-hosting a WordPress blog installed at your chosen web host and using your own registered Top Level Domain name as your blog’s URL.

Learn more about the Blogger Template Designer at Blogger in draft.

A WordPress theme is what makes your WordPress blog look the way it does.

A theme is made up of many files (they are called template files) and they work together to create the presentation of your WordPress blog. The colors, where certain parts of your blog’s interface are placed, the graphics, are all part of your blog’s theme. A WordPress theme provides the Graphical User Interface (GUI) for your blog, it’s a way to "skin" your blog.

Many WordPress themes are available, many of them are free and some are premium themes that you pay for. There are good WordPress themes and there are bad ones too. Designing a WordPress theme is something you can learn to do. Many talented people design WordPress themes and earn money for their efforts.

When you have your own self-hosted WordPress blog, when you Own Your Own Blog, you can have whatever theme you want for your blog. You can even design your own WordPress blog theme from scratch if you want. Learn more about WordPress themes from the horse’s mouth at WordPress.org

You are not stuck with your WordPress blog theme once you choose it. Through the WordPress Dashboard, you can choose a different theme from the various themes you have installed with your WordPress blog. Changing to a new theme is as simple as making a few clicks. If you are like most WordPress bloggers, when you start your blog you probably will install a number of themes to experiment with until you find the one that’s perfect for you and your blog. That’s a great thing about WordPress themes … there is no "correct" theme. You select the blog theme that you want. A WordPress theme is not cast in stone, if you know how, you can tweak a theme and customize it the way you want.

WordPress has an official directory for locating themes you can use for your WordPress blog. These WordPress themes are free for you to download and use. You can search the WordPress Theme Directory for different styles of themes and you may preview the themes. Free WordPress Theme Directory

The theme I chose for www.wpblogsandwebsites.com is DeepBlue by Daily Blog Tips. This theme has two columns and I use the version with the narrower column on the right.

The description of this theme by its designer; "DeepBlue is an elegant, two column WordPress theme. It is advertising ready, and it comes with several advanced features, including Feedburner integration, author comment styling and search engine optimization."

I chose this theme because I like it and I think it represents well what I want to do with this blog. I am capable with PHP, XHTML, and CSS so I have tweaked the DeepBlue theme somewhat. I replaced the top horizontal navigation menu bar that came with the theme, to a drop-down horizontal navigation menu bar that I prefer. I also altered the header.php and the footer.php files (these are some of the theme’s template files) to change the appearance somewhat of the top and bottom of this blog. I am using various plugins to add some features to this blog, so I have gone into some files of the theme template and added some code to make these plugins work the way I want them to. Nothing to complicated really, just some minor PHP, XHTML, and CSS tweaking.

I wound up with a blog presentation that I like. Over time, I’m sure I’ll tweak it more, and maybe someday I’ll switch to a different theme if I think that needs to be done. Remember, WordPress themes are not cast in stone! You can switch themes and tweak theme as you desire.

It’s very easy to find free WordPress themes. Perform a Google search for "free WordPress theme" and you’ll get more results than Carter has oats. I got 45,600,000 results as I wrote this post. Browsing around for that perfect theme for your blog may take some time. Find one you like.

Here are a couple of videos about WordPress themes I think you’ll find helpful:

You might need to increase the volume with this below video. Or, maybe I need my ears cleaned out. Yeah, hunh!