What is a blog administrator
An administrator is a Google account (controlled by a person!) that has full rights over your blog: they can do anything that you can do, including write posts, edit anyone else's posts, change the template, add gadgets and formatting rules. Also they can grant and remove author and administrator rights.This last point is very important: if you add someone as an administrator, then they immediately have the power to remove you as an administrator. This means that you need to be very careful who you give these rights to.
How to give someone administrator rights
Firstly, give them author rights.
To do this, you may need to log in as the other person, or to wait for them to accept the invitation themselves. If you log in as them, then make sure that you either:
- Use two computers,
- Use separate browsers on the same computer (eg Firefox and Chrome, or Internet Explorer and Safari), OR
- At least clear your cache and restart your browser between each login.
Then upgrade them by logging in to Blogger as yourself (ie with an account that has administrator rights already).
Pre-Sept-2011-Blogger (ie the old interface):
- Go to the dashboard, Settings > Permissions tab.
- Every account that has accepted an invitation to be an author will be listed. Choose the one want to make into an administrator, and click the Grant admin privliges link to the right of their email address.
- Click Grant admin privileges button on the confirmation screen
Post-Sept-2011-Blogger (ie the new interface):
- Go to the dashboard ("home" button), Settings > Basic tab.
- Scroll down to the Permissions area.
- Every account that has accepted an invitation to be an author will be listed. Choose the one want to make into an administrator, and choose Admin using the drop-down arrow to the right of their email address. (Note: this is an immediate change, you do not have to click Save.)
Note that there are also options here for removing administrator rights, and removing author rights too.
Very important:
If you are doing this before removing your own administrator rights, eg as part of transferring a blog from one account to another, then it is very important make sure that the transfer has been successful before removing yourself: you do not want to be in a situation where your own account is no longer an administrator, but you don't have access to the actual administrator account.
As before, ways of doing this include
- Using two different computers,
- Use separate browsers on the same computer (eg Firefox and Chrome, or Internet Explorer and Safari), OR
- At least clear your cache and restart your browser between each login.
Other things to consider
Comment moderation:
Only blog-administrators can moderate comments, so you may need to:
- Set up comment notification so that the new administrator is emailed when a comment is left
- Make sure that they know the policies that are applied to comments
- Agree who is responsible for moderation at what times
Custom domain administration:
If you have a custom domain, and the new administrator may need to be involved with this, then you need to tell them about the domain-administrator account that you set up after purchasing the domain.
Or if you are using a domain from an external domain registration company, they may need some other information about how to manage the domain.
Other blog settings:
Because an administrator has full control over the blog, they can do a number of things including:
- Editing posts made by other authors
- Change the template, layout or gadgets
- Edit any of the blog's Pages
- Granting and revoking other people's permissions
- Change the default language and date/time settings
- Changing the RSS feed settings in any way
- Edit the Adult-content warning setting, or the blog's Open-ID URL.
Related Articles:
Making an author for your blog.
Transferring blog ownership
Setting up a custom-domain administrator account
Using a custom domain from an alternative registrar
