Please join me in welcoming Google Blogger to the modern web. As you can see from the look of my site today, Blogger has rolled out a new beta feature called the Template Designer which allows users to assemble several thousand more combinations of layout, color, and graphics than with their previous selection of templates. Those spartan and occasionally cheesy designs were the main reasons why the service has been losing ground to the likes of Tumblr and Posterous amongst those setting up blogs for the first time, and also the reason why most people skin their blogspot blogs with horrendous amateur themes they find on sites with URLs like free-colorful-blogger-templates.com.

We all know ‘most people’ have no taste, so the Template Designer aims to save them from themselves by having a fixed library of background images from iStockPhoto (you can’t upload your own). I have chosen the least distracting and colorful one, a silhouette of the Parisian skyline, but look forward to experimenting with crazier options now and then. Why not? It used to take a deep dive into the HTML code and some tedious asset uploading to change the look of my site – those who’ve been here before will know that I hardly bothered anymore, and reverted to the most minimal of themes over a year ago – but now it’s all just a matter of clicking around and moving sliders.

Some of these features, like the dynamic width resizing and comprehensive inspectors for changing text/background colors, fonts, etc. replicate the best innovations of blog hosting company Squarespace. That service does a little more but costs money, and incidentally so does Six Apart’s Typepad, which now stands as the only hosted blogging platform remaining whose templates look so hopelessly mired in the early 2000s. Assuming that Blogger doesn’t just push out this one update and leave it untouched for another six years, they’ve got a fair chance of soundly beating the competition. A few weeks ago they added the ability to create standalone Pages, the kind you can use for an About Us page or FAQ. With a few more templates, perhaps some built for microblogging, some for magazine-style sites, they’ll be able to do everything Tumblr can. They’ve got post-by-email functionality that isn’t too far off from what Posterous does, and WordPress.com can’t compete with the freedom Blogger gives you to add third-party scripts, widgets, and ads.

One interesting point: Microsoft IE6 is not supported by the editor or the templates themselves.