Yesterday I upgraded to Blogger Beta and a new template. What do you think?

Based on a day of playing around with it, here are some quick impressions.

1. Blogger Beta templates have a clean, professional look that figure to be much more appealing to business bloggers than the original Blogger options.

2. Easier to customize templates.

3. A host of built-in options for the sidebar, making Bogger Beta as potentially content-rich as any platform out there.

4. Easier to insert code to set up blogrolls, feeds, etc.

5. Labels, or categories, have finally arrived. A huge step forward in making Blogger reader-friendly and business-friendly. Setup and backloading labels is easy, although fairly time-consuming.

Hierarchical categories (i.e., categories and subcategories) would be a great next step. They allow readers to drill down to a specific subject of interest more easily than scanning a list of 50-500 categories on the sidebar.

6. The “Help” section, as with old Blogger, is vague and poorly organized. Fortunately, the platform is so simple, you can figure out much of what you need by trial and error.

All in all, a major improvement.