Blogger Template Designer - BTD

It's a sunny Saturday morning at my place, a perfect time to exercise .. nay, maybe to design new templates or write something :-D

This might not be fresh anymore and outthere you might find tens or hundreds of articles mentioning it: the newest official blogger (in-draft) tool - Blogger Template Designer. Well, for me, the name is too long to mentioned several times, so I would refer to BTD instead. Besides, there is no official acronym, isn't it?

What

If you are newbies then this is a relevant question right? Officially, BTD is is a new way for you to easily customize the look of your blog. You can select a variety of templates, images, colors, and column layouts to make your blog an expression of you.

The screenshot above shows you the appearance of BTD. It is very nice isn't it? Well, sure, currently it isn't perfect yet e.g. you will find "only" 15 templates you can choose from.

Why

This is the next question you might ask :-D .. Why should I use it? As our blogging activity increases time to time, most of us is confronted with the fact that some (if not all) templates are always feature-limited and we cannot go further without changing it to fit our needs e.g. you need more sidebar columns or more useable space, you might want to adjust colors and width of the widget etc.

Sure, you can go into the HTML/XML source file and play a little bit with the codes inside :-D ... but BTD offer a better way, that would make it loved by "ordinary" bloggers who want to live peacefully without fighting the codes .. :-D .. so try it yourself!

How

It's easy. Follow these steps:

1	Log in to your Blogger-In-Draft dashboard at draft.blogger.com
2	Before you play around with the BTD, you might want to backup/save your current template ( Layout --> Edit HTML --> Download Full Template)
3	While the Layout tab active, you will immeadiately see the Template Designer at the right end of the sub-tabs (see picture below)
4	Click the Template Designer link, you will be delivered to the BTD page. After playing around with it, you might want to save the changes you've made by clicking the "Apply to Blog" link on the top-right corner of the page. Done!