Template Designer is Live

The Template Designer which I blogged about a couple of months ago when it was in beta, has gone live!

This brings in a powerful WYSIWYG editor to tweak your templates in many beautiful ways. The features include the ability to pick from professionally designed templates, option to select professional images as background images, ability to select many different layouts such as two-column, three-column etc in a snap and much more. The Template Designer is truly a wonder tool for the non-technical bloggers who were afraid of meddling around with the HTML, CSS etc to customize their templates.

With the introduction of this new remarkable feature, Blogger has revised the buttons on the admin console as well. The former Layout button has gone out and a new button called Design has taken its place. The sub-menu for this section has also been revised with the old Fonts and Colors and Pick New Template buttons being replaced with a single Template Designer button. (see figure below)

The Edit HTML option still remains allowing the more technically inclined bloggers to dig deep. However, the template structure seems to have gone through drastic changes in order to support the new Template Designer. Don't worry, Blogger will take care of migrating your existing template to this new format if and when you modify your template using this option. One thing to note, however, is that you will lose any existing customizations on top of the current default templates.

See the official Blogger Buzz announcement for more details.