Blogger or WordPress? Blogspot.com subdomain or custom .com domain? These are some recurrent questions which people do when they want to start a "professional" blog.
My personal opinion is: Blogger is the best choice to publish your web site for free and I want to dedicate this post to illustrate the real power of this platform to create professional and succesful web sites, taking advantage of all free Google services like Picasa Web Album and Google Pages.
How organize images on your Blogger site
I read in several articles about Blogger you can't manage images you load on your posts. This is not true! When you load an image from the Blogger Post Editor it is saved on your Google Picasa Web Album account. To have a full control on all graphic element you load on your site you have simply to access to Picasa Web Album. You can do it directly from Google Home Page selecting Photos from the menu:
All images of your Blog are saved in an Album and you can organize them how you prefer in a very simple way:
Use Picasa Web Album to mantain original image quality
When you load a picture directly from the Blogger Post Editor, you will notice the quality of image you loaded is worse then original picture. I think Blogger uses (correctly) an image "compressor" to avoid people load enormous size pictures which would render too much weighed the page loading. But how can you do if you want to reserve the original quality for your picture (for example because you need the better quality for your layout elements)? I found this problem when I uploaded the background image on my site header directly from the Blogger Post Editor. The result was very bad. So I tryied to load the image directly from my Picasa account and voilĂ ! Perfect quality.
Favicon Tips
I found several post about this topic very helpful but not completely exact. In fact all these articles suggest to upload your favicon with .ico extension on Google Page Creator. But if you use .ico extension for your file, fivicon will not be displayed correctly and it will sobstituded with GooglePages default icon. So, I suggest to use a .gif file instead of .ico. Anyway using a .gif file you can always upload your favicon directly on Google Picasa Web Album.
To display your favicon on web browser address bar you have to add this code into the tag of your template:
"shortcut icon" href="http://yoursite.googlepages.com/favicon.gif"/>
Professional layout on Blogger
I also read some opinions about the difficulty to design a "professional" layout on Blogger compared to Wordpress. It's completely false. There are not any different. You have to modify lines of code on Wordpress like on Blogger. The only limit you have is your creativity.
I hope this post can help you to consider the real power of Blogger also creating complex and "professional" web site layout for your free, money-maker, succesful blog.
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