Wow, talk about unexpected…
Blogger as a blogging platform has kind of been on the wane. And with the way Google has a history of pulling the plug on products somewhat abruptly, it wouldn’t have surprised me if they announced on Monday that they were sunsetting Blogger at some point in the not too distant future.
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| Image: Slate.com |
Instead, for the first time in quite a few years, they announced that they’ve released 4 new native Blogger themes for people to give their blogs a nice little (mobile-friendly) face lift. Talk about overdue.
Introducing: Contempo, Soho, Emporio, & Notable.
The new themes can be found in your blog dashboard, and can be easily customized with Blogger’s simple to use WYSIWYG tools. Honestly, as I’ve tried other 3rd party themes over the years, and found the biggest issue to be the fact that customization usually required some bit of coding to get it how I wanted it to look, or afterward still wouldn’t care to load pages particularly quickly. This immediately solves those issues.
Are the 4 new themes perfect? No. Is Blogger anywhere near as customizable as WordPress? No, but they’re a step in the right direction, and I’m happy they invested resources in this minor, yet needed update.
If you use a Blogger blog, check them out. I flipped this blog over to the “Contempo” theme in a matter of minutes.
Excellent!! Great news…
Sure looks clean and fresh, Michael. I took a look at the themes. However, The River Damsel says I cannot make any more changes and I think I know how the fellow from Troutrageous feels about that, too!
Ha! I think RD will let you make visual changes. Just stop changing that URL! 🙂
Baby steps RD. Need to get back to blogging again, maybe this is a kick in the pants to get after it.
Cool. 👍
Yup, I think Contempo is it.
I have done all the changing, re-modeling, etc. that I am going to do. Having too much fun with my blog, my Facebook Group, and, lo and behold, my new online shop. Thanks for all you have done for me!
I dig it. Still have some tweaking to do, but I like the change. My biggest frustration with my last page was the load times.
Super rad.
Hahahahaha. Maybe!
I saw that email update about the themes, too. I'm really happy to hear they're not dropping Blogger, yet. I would hate to switch formats.
I quite like blogger, but I was worried Google might pull the plug so I went with wordpress. Has I known blogger had a secure future I would've used it again instead.
Yeah, I always backup my blog just in case. Have a WordPress backup in the wings, just hope I never have to use it.
You can always come back if you want to. Although you probably don't need to. I just find Blogger to be simple, so I've never moved off.
I'm not touching a thing. I've experienced Google customer support.