• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 11, 2010

Google began Thursday publicly testing a Blogger layout tool that the company says allows people to customize the look of their blog.

The templates tool supports professional designs, prebuilt templates and a color control to alter the blog's palette of colors. Those familiar with CSS and HTML will find the ability to integrate stock photos and custom background scenes, too.

There are 15 templates, hundreds of background images from iStockphoto, and custom colors, fonts and blog layouts with one, two or three columns. One new feature lets people change the color palette of the blog with a color slider.

Google has made the Blogger Template Designer available through Blogger in Draft, Blogger's test lab, also known to developers as a sandbox or test bed. Blogger supports more than 300 million active users and more than 388 million words are published on Blogger every day, according to Google.

Template Designer does not support Internet Explorer 6. While Google made an effort to ensure readability, the new designs will not look particularly attractive on IE6, the company says. "We strongly encourage the very small number of bloggers and readers still using IE6 to upgrade to a more modern browser," Google's Pete Hopkins writes, without adding (can you say Google Chrome 4).

Hopkins also explains that the rounded corners and drop shadows in several templates may not become visible in older versions of some browsers. Opera users will need to wait for Opera 10.5, now in public pre-alpha release. IE7 and 8 users will not see these effects within the Template Designer, but will see most of them on the live blog itself.

In the Template Designer, bloggers will only have the ability to move gadgets around -- you can't add, delete, or change the settings. Those features are still on the Layout > Page Elements page, Hopkins says.

The tips from the blogger team range from getting links to match a background image quickly to setting up a three-column footer that can fit several gadgets to interest your readers after they have finished reading your post.