For all those who stuck around with Google’s free blog hosting service Blogger, Google has just rolled out the new Template Designer. Finally, the folks at Blogger.com realized that the old selection of templates are too outdated and decided to introduced some new templates that you can use on your blogs as well as a new set of tools for customizing your blogs including designing your own Blogger template. This is also good news for those who wants to start their own blogs just now but don’t want to use WordPress.com.

Google’s Blogger Template Designer currently offers 15 new professional templates, custom blog layouts that you can apply in each of the new templates, professional background images coming from iStockphoto plus several color, fonts and other customization features that you can use.

If you have an existing Blogger account, you can try the Template Designer out by going to Blogger in Draft. Once you’ve come up with a great design, you can simply save it

The Blogger Template Designer is  currently hosted in Blogger in Draft where you are free to try it out on your blog. You can see the Template Designer if you click on the Layout link. Once you’ve come up with the best template and design for your blog you can opt to apply it on your blog.

It would be interesting to note why it took Google this long to come up with such features. I almost thought that Google is about to shut down Blogger since it has not been given too much attention the past few months. But then again, given the millions of blogs hosted on Blogger.com, Google will definitely put this service down.

If you are currently maintaining a Blogger blog, check out the new Template Designer and share with us your experience.

Originally posted on March 11, 2010 @ 5:34 pm