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Not too long ago Google AdSense (advertisements you see on most websites) created a new ad size called “Responsive”. This is a size a lot of developers wanted or really needed for a very long time. The role of this size is to use the space available and pick the best sized ad for that location. For example, if I create a div with the width of 300px, I can expect a 300x250 advertisement, 300x600 or a 160x600 (inside of the 300x600).

With the simplicity of adding advertisements to your Blogger website, it may be difficult to realize how to modify the advertisements and customize them. Advertisements that are automatically added to Blogger through the linked Earnings tab are located in two spots, under posts (between posts) and on the sidebar.

The advertisements under posts are rectangles and don’t usually fit nice with the design. So customizing these advertisements settings to leaderboards could really improve the look of your site. Of course, if you have ads added through HTML or widgets, customizing them is a little different.

Below is a list of all the Blogger Widget’s and tags available for each widget. This list is most likely incomplete but will hopefully provide you with more information than the original Google Documentation for this subject. I have found all of these through guessing, looking at Google Themes, from the small parts of documentation out there and by sheer luck. If you have any data elements that we miss, it would be highly appreciated if you could tell us so we can include it in our list below.

The documentation for Blogger Themes is lacking and incorrect in many spots, making it really difficult to get started on your own. You could of course rip code segments from existing themes but that is hardly the best method to go about creating your own theme. This document will cover the basic structure of the Blogger theme. In future posts (linked at the end) I will cover more parts about Blogger Themes.

Using Blogger for your website is a great choice for many reasons. Not only is it free, fast, secure, customizable, but it’s also really easy to setup along with the ability to have a custom domain name linked to your account.

Adding a Custom Domain to your Blogger account will indeed help traffic and keep visitors coming back to your site. A custom domain name is a regular domain name, such as geekthis.net, but not a domain name ending with “.blogger.com”. The reason a custom domain name helps visitors keep returning to your site is brand identity. Instead of them having to remember the full domain name including blogger.com, they have to just remember your name. Also, having a domain name and not a sub domain on top of blogger.com, will make your site appear more professional.