Blogger is the great, widely used blog software developed independently but now owned by the good people at Google. The program is free, easy to use, well organized and intuitive.
Having a blog through Google makes it really easy to monetize – use AdSense to place ads and possibly make some money.
Blogger also provides plenty of challenge for more advanced users who want to customize their blog – build their own templates.
Mobile blogging capabilities are fully utilized here – BlogThis! is a downloadable client. You can also email your posts to publish on your blog or send them from your mobile phone.
The biggest downside to all this free is being stuck with a subdomain and no tracking or traffic stat tools – they are available as add-ons and you will have to pay for them. (You can buy a domain name through Blogger, though).
Switching templates in Blogger is so easy you might find yourself changing templates with your mood or the weather. All you have to do is go to Layout in your account and select Pick New Template. Then you can browse all the available templates. You can then select the Edit HTML tab if you speak the language and customize it to your heart’s content.
Page Elements is another tab located under Layout. Here you can add new or drag and drop current Gadgets (the Google term for widgets or plugins). We also found it easy to edit the top navigation bar in this tab – there are really only four choices, but it’s free and easy to do!
The Fonts and Colors tab allows a little bit of customization as well. Just select the area you wish to color and select a color from the palette. The built-in preview screen changes to reflect your colors right before your eyes. You can then opt to save the changes or clear the edits. So play around with colors – it’s fun!
Everything is free on Blogger and there are no upgrades, per se. There are outside services you can use with your Blogger account to enhance your experience with the program. For example, any images you upload for use with Blogger go to your Picasa Web Albums, which are part of your Google account. The number of images you can upload is dependent on the amount of space you are allotted on Picasa 0 1GB of storage for just photos and videos. You can pay for more storage on Picasa – these rates begin at $20 per year for a 10 GB storage upgrade.
Being a Google product, Blogger is well documented in a searchable knowledge base. It is also logically organized by task on a sidebar so you can really just scan the options pretty quickly. There are also entire articles devoted to certain issues such as the Layout Guide, Getting Started Guide and an article entitled, “Will you help me with HTML, CSS, Javascript, or other code?”
Blogger also has nine separate video tutorials to address specific tasks. The videos are all less than three minutes long – which is a valid reflection of just how easy it is to use this program.
Blogger is not only the best of the totally free blog software programs, it ranks up there with other paid programs we reviewed here. It is full of features and functions like a champ for the beginning blogger.
