If you're serious about starting a blog but don't know much about hosting a website or coding HTML, Google's Blogger is the best free tool you'll find. The platform has been significantly redesigned and improved (existing users, make sure you're signed up for Blogger in Draft, which is like an open beta; the release should officially roll out to everyone sometime in July or August 2011) after years of being fairly stagnant. Team Blogger has finally tucked a rich text editor into the system—a long overdue change—and developed an amazing template designer that lets blog users customize the look of their blogs without ever touching a line of code.

As a veteran Blogger user, I've embraced the changes with open arms, welcoming integrated Analytics access, the better use of screen space in the dashboard, and simplified buttons and icons. Google needs to iron out some kinks before the dashboard goes global to all users, but they are few and far between. As free blogging platforms go, Blogger rocks equally as hard as our other Editors' Choice Wordpress.com (free, 4.5 stars). The only real difference between them is Wordpress has a steeper learning curve, although it is surmountable. Wordpress is also better at importing an existing blog from another blog site, which is useful to know if you're thinking of switching platforms, perhaps upgrading from the more simplistic Posterous (free, 3.5 stars) or Tumblr (free, 3 stars).

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Both Wordpress.com and Blogger are free if you use a domain name that ends with the site's brand (.wordpress.com and .blogspot.com, respectively). If you're ready to pay for a custom domain name, Blogger's pricetag is a steal at $10 per year. That's the lowest I've seen, especially considering that Blogger will continue to host your content—no need to pay extra for storage. Wordpress.com charges $17 per year, which is a fair and reasonable rate, but it seems steep when compared to Blogger's.

Sign Up and Dashboard
Because Blogger is part of Google's empire, you need to create a Google account to have a Blogger account, meaning you'll have one login for all Google's services, such as Gmail and Google Docs. If you already have a Google account, just sign in and navigate to Blogger.com (or draft.blogger.com before July 31, 2011, to make sure you see the latest version).

Next, give your blog a title and choose a URL—which must end in .blogspot.com during set up, even though you can pay for a custom domain name later if you want. Next, you choose a basic template as a starting point, which you can further customize soon. You're now set up and ready to start posting content or customizing the look of your blog.

The old Blogger dashboard worked fine but was heavy with tabs, which took some time to learn. The new dashboard uses ample white space and dropdown menus to put the tools you need in front you at the right times—no more searching through tabs to find what you need.