BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

Each platform has features that are beneficial for all types of bloggers, but for a beginner Blogger is the way to go. You may be wondering why Blogger is the best blogging platform for beginners. There are many reasons, but the following are the main features of Blogger by Google that make it the best for beginning bloggers.

Ease of Use

If you are new to the world of blogging you want to find a platform that will allow you to be creative without having to learn a lot of code and spend most of your time trying to figure out how things work. Blogger offers a platform that is wonderful for beginners but with enough options to make it ideal for experienced bloggers as well.

Monetization

Many bloggers want to monetize their blogs so that they can earn via ad revenue and affiliates. Blogger features an easy monetization tab that lets you integrate Google AdSense and Amazon affiliates programs. There are also easy to use HTML widgets that you can use to include other types of ads and affiliates.

Unique Designs

There are hundreds of thousands of templates available online for the Blogger platform. This lets you easily create a unique look for your blog. Download a layout template from any site that features free blogger templates and upload it using the easy to manage dashboard in Blogger to make your blog design fit your vision of what you want your blog to be.

URL Freedom

With Blogger you can elect to use a ‘dot blogspot’ URL for free, purchase a domain name on the Blogger site or use a domain name you already own. This lets you begin with a free URL until you find out how your blog is going to do, or whether it is a blog you are going to keep before you purchase a domain name for it. Changing your URL is easy as well through the settings options on Blogger.

Widgets

The widgets that Blogger offer include everything from a sidebar calendar to news feeds and social network links. These widgets are easy to use and access from the Blogger dashboard under the design tab.

Blogging is fun and often profitable for many people, however when you are a beginning blogger you want to choose a blogging platform that will give you a chance to learn how all the features of a blog work together to create a finished product that will attract readers. Blogger is a great platform to get started on and you’ll find that the easy linking of all your Google accounts helps you create a solid Internet presence.

About the Author:

Lisa Mason is a freelance writer with a specialty in Internet content and SEO articles and the author of How to Earn a Living Writing for the Internet. She has written thousands of articles, hundreds of ebooks and thousands of website pages and related content in more than 10 years as a professional writer.

See her website for a free article writing template guide as well as more information about writing and the writing services she offers.

Article Source

Image via CrunchBase

When you first sign up for a blog on a site like Blogger, there is a wide variety of options made available that allow you to reach out to your readers.

From customizable templates to imbedded videos, audio and advertising, the new blogger seemingly has the world at his or her fingertips.

That warm and fuzzy feeling eventually starts to wear off though as new ideas pop up that may not be immediately covered by Blogger’s built-in features.

Luckily, Blogger and essentially any other blogging platform allows its writers to add any number of open source add-ons to their blogs for enhanced features and interaction with readers.

AdSense
The single greatest thing you can do for your blog is turn it into a profitable outlet for your daily writing. Google’s very own AdSense add-on is one of the easiest and most effective ways to do this. The best part is that it is incredibly easy to add AdSense to your blog through the interface provided by Google in Blogger. Read the rest of this entry →

If you are like me, you are always downloading some new widget for your blog or some new toolbar for your browser. Then later, sometimes you find out that it was a vehicle for malware or some other sleazy purpose.

It may not seem like a design issue, but security is a very big deal these days. People are having their blogs hacked (and deleted). And those who rely on advertising or product sales from their blogs stand to lose a lot. So boring as security may seem to some, it is very important to all of us—whether we realize yet it or not.

What if you didn’t have to worry about security, or viruses, or malware anymore? And if you sell products on your blog or offer downloadable information, what if you could guarantee the safety of your downloads to your readers? In a believable way?

A company called Comodo (http://www.comodo.com) offers free antivirus and firewall software. But more important, they are on a mission to make the Web a safe place. Or as they put it, to bring trust back to the Internet. How cool is that? 

And their software is really free, not just a demo.

BlogCatalog.com has come up with an interesting replacement for the BlogRush widget. It displays your own blog posts (on however many blogs you have registered with BlogCatalog) and some other activities such as Diggs. You’ll see one in the right-hand sidebar of this page.

You can choose from about eight colors, and you set the width (in pixels) and the number of items to display (so you effectively control the height as well). If you have several blogs, this is a great way to send traffic from one to another.

Besides the WordPress version, you can create BlogCatalog widgets that work with Blogger and TypePad blogs as well. It is easy and fun.

BlogCatalog offers four different widgets in all. If you scroll down, you will see their Recent Viewers widget (with dozens of tiny pictures). Those are also highly customizable. You can choose the size, number of pictures, color of the frame and the text, and so on.

Widgets are just one of the benefits of belonging to the BlogCatalog community. You can get great exposure for you blogs there, join groups, make friends, and find many interesting and entertaining blogs. I highly recommend it.

Below that is a similar widget, created at MyBlogLog.com, another online blog-listing community where you should list your blogs if you haven’t already.

As I’m currently updating my old blogs and developing new ones, I will be checking on all the old favorite blog registrars and trying out new ones. I’ll report back here on the best ones I find.

Am I the only one who hates the new WordPress widget management feature? I guess it is OK if you have just a two-column theme (only one column of widgets). But this theme, for example, has three columns just for widgets: upper left, upper right, and lower.

The upper left and upper right columns have to be balanced to keep from leaving gaping holes in the layout. So now and then I have to move items back and forth. The old way was slow. The new way is horrible!

You can see all the widgets at once, in a list on the left of the widget management page, but you can only view one column of your page layout at at time. To move a widget from one column to another, instead of just dragging it (the old way), now you have to Remove it from one column, switch column views, and then Add it to the other.

In the old way you could not see how much space each widget would occupy (how many column inches), but you could see how many widgets were in each column, and with a good visual memory you could estimate. You could at least see all the columns at the same time.

Without seeing all the columns at once, I can’t remember what all is in each one (especially once I start moving things around). So now it’s just a lot harder to make even simple changes in the arrangement of the widgets. For me, anyway.

I can’t even imagine why anyone thought this was a better way to manage widgets. How about you?