Creating your own blog can be a great way to publish your view points and opinions or just your favorite images of your cat. Creating a personal blog has never been easier as there are a number of websites that let users stamp out their own little corner of the internet. There's even free
 software that let's anybody set up their own fully functional blogs on their own domains with little effort and for free.

Getting started with blogging is very easy, and you could be sharing your outlooks with the world in a matter of just a few minutes, with absolutely no technical knowledge required. This is great news for inspired writers everywhere, these free services provides a great platform for publishing and maintaining blogs. When it comes to personalizing your blog, most places offer the option to choose from different templates, and maybe even let's you change the colors of the different elements on your page. In many cases though, the blog enthusiast will want to go outside the limited options available out of the box, and create a more unique presence.

In this article I will explain how to take advantage of the template capabilities of one of the most popular blog hosting services out there, blogger.com. If you want to go beyond the layout provided, blogger let's you customize the look of your blog down to the smallest detail. This is great for web designers and professionals who know how to use HTML and CSS to create great looking web interfaces, but for the rest of us, anything we paste together in the blogger HTML editor is likely to look considerably worse than the standard templates already available. Luckily for us, there are several resources where you can find excellent blogger templates that you are free to use and modify for your blog. These websites have the very best collections of blogger templates you will find.

Installing a new blogger template is very easy. When you have found a look that you like, download the template to your hard drive. The template will be an xml file that you can import directly into blogger, and you will have a brand new look for your blog immediately. To upload the xml file to your blog, simply click the customize banner, then click the edit HTML link. In the HTML editor window you will see an option at the top of the page to export your current template or import a new one. If you want to be able to go back to your current design later, make sure you export it first. Exporting the template will create an xml file on your hard drive that you can import into blogger later. To import the new template, simply click the upload button, and browse to the xml file with the template you have downloaded. When the file transfer is complete, make sure to save your changes, and you can check out your blog in all it's new glory.

Btemplates.com

This site impresses on all levels, tons of available templates of high quality. A great category system that makes it easy to find the type of template you are looking for, and live demos of all the templates so you can easily see how the templates look in action. The site also includes user rating for the templates, as well as download statistics if you want to make sure your template is somewhat fresh and unique. Always start your blogger template search here.

Pyzam.com

When looking for layouts, it's impossible to get around pyzam. They have established themselves as one of the very best place to get myspace layouts and applications, but they also have a good section for blogger templates. The best part of their blogger template section is the great variety, the not so good part is that the categories doesn't make too much sense and it's difficult to know where to look for the template you want.

www.bloggertemplatesblog.com/

This site has over 700 blogger templates, and many of them are excellent. Several templates use some nice fancy effects that really can make your blog stand out from the crowd. The templates are all tagged with their different properties, and you can fast navigate to classes of templates using a tag cloud. This site is well worth a visit if you are looking for something special for your blog.

http://www.bloggerstyles.com/

This is another high quality web site that feature some really nice work. The blogger templates are all categorized and very easy to navigate. The site also has it's own ranking system that helps you pick templates that have been tested to work and includes certain criteria. Overall, a very useful and easy site to use, with some very high quality designs.

If you are looking to take your blog to the next level, you are guaranteed to find an excellent blogger template that suits your taste on one of these sites. The easy instructions makes the templates a breeze to install, leaving you all the more time to focus on your blogging.