Blog to Fit

Now, specify the template you want to use for your blog. If you don't know HTML, fear not. You can select from a gallery of attractive templates simply by clicking on the one you want.

If you're setting up a news page for a business site, you'll probably want it to match the rest of the pages. That's not a problem. Any competent Web designer will be able to create the necessary template for you, and you can paste it into the appropriate place in your Blogger admin screen.

You may also set formatting and archiving settings for the content: the maximum number of entries on the page and how often to archive old entries onto a separate page (to stop the main page getting too long).

Once you've completed the setup process, create your first entry and type in some text. If you're using Internet Explorer, you'll see three buttons in the top toolbar. These allow you to format text in bold or italic, and to add links. These don't appear in Netscape, so if you use that, you will need to type the necessary HTML code yourself.

Ready, Click, Publish

When you're ready, click "post and publish." This will let you check that your FTP settings and template are OK. Once the publishing process is complete, click "view page" to see your page in a new window.

From now on, whenever you want to add a new item, just log into Blogger and copy or paste your text into the posting window, then click "post and publish." From the Blogger administration page, you can also view, edit or delete your previous posts.

If you have more than one page to update, create several blogs, one for each page, with descriptive names to remind you which is which.

Blogger has limitations. It doesn't allow the easy addition of graphics to individual items (although your template can include graphics).

Then there's the possibility that Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger, might go bust. It had serious financial problems earlier this year but was bailed out by Trellix, a company that provides online Web-building tools.

Blog This!

But even if Blogger disappeared tomorrow, your content would still exist on your site. You would only lose the ability to use Blogger to update it.

On the plus side, Blogger has additional features that let you take it beyond the basics I've outlined. Skilled users can incorporate Blogger content into dynamically generated pages or use eXtensible Markup Language (XML) templates to add functionality.

You can add a "Blog this!" button to your browser, which allows you to highlight a section of a Web page and copy it into your blog with a link to the source. And, most interestingly for business use, you can set up a team, which allows other members of your staff to update the page.

Once you are comfortable using Blogger, check out the How To section, which gives detailed instructions for adding features to your blog.

So if site updates are a headache, look at Blogger before investigating more expensive options.