How to Create an Website Using Blogger
Blogger
Blogger was founded in 1999 by Pyra Labs and acquired by Google in 2003. By 2006, every account was hosted on Google’s servers, making the platform a lot more reliable.
Blogger or BlogSpot?
Before we go any further, let’s clear up any confusion regarding the terms Blogger and BlogSpot.
Blogger is a free publishing platform, while BlogSpot is a free domain service provider.
They’re both owned by Google and are used together on the Blogger platform.
- Try entering the URL: blogspot.com
- And you’ll end up at this URL: blogger.com
When you create your blog on Blogger, you’ll automatically get a BlogSpot domain. But you don’t have to use the BlogSpot domain; you can also add your custom domain:
To summarize: Google hosts your blog on their Blogger platform with a default BlogSpot domain.
Setting up your blog
Creating your blog on Blogger is straightforward. You’ll need a Google account if you don’t already have one.
- Enter a name for your blog.
- Choose a Blog Address (URL) – Blogger confirms if your chosen blog address is available.
- Pick a Theme – There are a handful of themes (templates) displayed as you create your blog, but you can browse more and customize your blog later.
Here’s how I created my blog:
After you’ve created your blog, Google offers you the chance to buy a custom domain from them. It’s an optional step, and you can always change it later:
Note: While you can buy your domain directly through Google, we always recommend buying it from a third party such as Namecheap. This ensure’s greater control and more security.
Managing your blog
After the optional step of buying a domain, you’ll see your blog dashboard.
At the moment it’s empty, but this is where you’ll manage your blog.
From the left-hand menu you can:
- Create and view your posts, pages, comments, and statistics
- Change the layout and theme
- Manage earnings, campaigns, and settings
Above the menu, you can click the link to view your blog:
There are no blog posts yet, but in the right-hand sidebar, there’s an ‘About Me’ section that uses your default Google+ profile information.
Creating a blog post
Blogger has a basic WYSIWYG editor with the option to toggle into HTML mode. You can add images and video to your post, or you can embed YouTube videos. If you prefer, you could create your post in Google Docs, and then copy and paste it into the editor, like this:
On the right-hand side, you have Post settings for adding labels (Tags), scheduling the publishing date, defining your permalink, plus options for commenting and privacy.
Personalizing your blog
You can change the appearance of your blog using different themes and layouts.
Start with a base theme and customize your background, layout, colors, fonts and more. You can either use the Blogger Theme Designer or edit the HTML code yourself:
Blogger offers lots of themes, but you can also upload free and premium themes from third-party vendors.
Blogger uses Gadgets (the equivalent of WordPress Widgets) to help design the layout of your page. You can use Gadgets to do things like display your blog’s archive, show blog labels in a list on every page, or put your profile on every page.
Once you’ve added a gadget you can drag-and-drop it on your page layout as you wish:
What we like about Blogger
- Simple to get started
- Easy to use and manage
- Hosted by Google so no installation issues
- Don’t have to worry about software updates
- Options to monetize with Adsense and promote with Adwords
What we don’t like about Blogger
- Social sharing is geared towards Google+ rather than all social networks
- Google can suspend your blog at any time, or even cancel the Blogger service altogether.
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