Those who have always snubbed the Google Blogger platform to create websites and blogs because of its limitations, will now have to change their minds and admit how Blogger has become the most complete and free platform that can be found online to certainly create blogs or even sites of different types. The only limitations of Blogger are, firstly that you cannot upload an internal database to it, secondly the fact that the site resides on Google servers which, being the owner of this service, can do whatever it wants (even if a similar service of these proportions should never close).
Using the Blogger platform today still means being able to have an online tool always available from any PC, linked to the Google account, from which you can set up and publish a new website in 5 minutes, even with a personalized domain (such as www.navigaweb .net), which has no management and maintenance costs even if it makes 1000 or more visits per day.
Recent improvements to the platform have also led Blogger to be a perfect tool to create optimized and even created sites from scratch, with an advanced html code editor that can make the happiness of experienced or novice webmasters happy.
If the less good users can choose the graphics and the layout model using the customized Blogger templates or even the modern models with dynamic display of the blogs, the more advanced ones can instead write the code directly from the new HTML editor.
From the Model section you can now go to HTML edit mode to view and change the website source code to your liking.
If you know how to program in HTML, CSS and / or JavaScript, you can completely customize your preferences without any limit .
The new features are centered on ease of use (or rather, more friendly for programmers) and aim to increase productivity and avoid making mistakes.
Previously, the HTML template editor was without any shape, a blank page like a notepad, without formatting, very complicated to use.
To make changes you had to download the code, make changes with a more comfortable editor (such as Notepad ++ among the best programs for web-designers) and then load it again.
Now, however, it is possible to orient yourself better thanks to a more presentable, more comfortable to use, colorful appearance, with the following characteristics:
- Numbering of lines : now it is possible to see the numbers of each line making it easier to identify errors and keep track of the work.
- Highlighted text : with each piece of code colored differently much more readable.
- Compressed and expandable code
For example, you can easily understand what is inside a widget or a div tag by clicking on the arrow (►).
If before you could expand the code with the view of all widgets, you can now expand the pieces individually, creating less confusion.
From the top button you can quickly switch to one widget or another.
for example, the CSS rules that are at the top of the model are inside the section
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- Code formatted with indents so you can read it more easily.
There is also a Format Template button to put all the HTML in order so that it is easy to read.
- You can press the key combination CTRL-F to search the code .
- See the preview without loading a new page on the browser.
In addition to all this, a portion of HTML code or any Javascript can be added to a widget from the Layout section for some time now.
You can also add HTML code inside the blog posts and pages without problems of operation and, in fact, you can always import Youtube videos, external images or scripts.
With the advanced HTML editor anyone can make a site by modifying existing templates or making a new one, even not in the form of a blog but as a normal website (basically with static pages and without the possibility of making comments).
Finally, in the advanced settings section of the Blogger.com web application there are the Search Preferences to optimize the site so that it correctly meets the search engine standards.
Since Blogger is from Google and Google is the main search engine, we can trust that those are the most important settings to take care of:
- Addition of the Metatag description (you can also do it from the HTML editor manually);
- Custom page not found where to redirect visitors to the site who are wrong address;
- Custom redirects, to make sure that the address of an old page leads to that of a new one
- advanced settings (for experts) for Crawler and indexing regarding the writing of the robots.txt file and customized robot header tags .
Counting then that a site on blogger is automatically added to Google's Webmaster Tools and verified by the search engine without manual interventions, that you can put Adsense advertising with two clicks only by registering (but the site must receive some visits first), that the Google+ profile also becomes the profile of the author of the blog and can be used to comment, the squaring of the circle is soon done.
In my view, Blogger remains the most powerful tool that can be found online, both free and not free, even better than Wordpress.com (other than Wordpress intended as a free CMS for blogs and sites, downloadable from Wordpress.org and from upload to private hosting)
However, it is not the easiest because Tumblr remains the most immediate solution to use.
