Google Is Finally Refreshing Blogger

Blogger is undoubtedly one of the most popular blogging platforms. However over the past few years Blogger has been losing out to it's counterpart blogging platforms. The reason for this has been lack of major updates, customisations and plugin support. Even though Blogger is a free platform and has one of the most user friendly interfaces, Blogger has been subjected to a lot of criticism from web developers lately who have constantly been complaining about the lack of updates which will make the Blogger blogs compliant with the material design guidelines from Google and also offer more customisartions to the blog developers. However, Google is now taking in user feedback into consideration as well and with the introduction of recent wave of updates, Google intends to rehape the blogging platform. Let's talk about the most recent update we have had.

Google has done a complete redesign of the Blogger welcome screen, finally getting rid of the old boring welcome screen. The new splash screen now displays an intuitive layout, highlighting the various features of Blogger and is also great to look at.

Google has updated Blogger’s header bar and along with it the colors of the blogging platform as well. The header bar now looks more materialised than before and is now "consistent with what you’ll find in other Google products". The header bar has now gotten rid of the "view blog" and "make a new post" option as well. Coming to the colors, Google decided to give up the black color and now has instead adopted a green tinged color to highlight the post titles and auhor names "to make things easier to see". Another change which regular Blogger users can recognise is the updated icons in the Blogger sidebar.

Blogger Dashboard

From now on, upon opening Blogger, you will be taken straight to the blog which had the most recent published post or the most recent draft. That means that you will no longer be able to access the Blogger dashboard which used to show you the list of all the blogs you can write on. In order to navigate between blogs you can write on, you will now have to use the drop-down menu in the top-left corner of the screen.

Google has now also done away with the 'Overview' menu. As the above screenshot from the previous UI shows, using the Overview menu, blog owners could previously see the number of page views as well as get the latest news feed from Blogger as well. However after this design update, the options of Reading List and Help have now been embedded into the left sidebar.

Just below the options of Reading List and Help at the bottom the sidebar, links to Google's Terms of Service, Privacy and Content Policy can be found as well. Talking about color changes, the color of these three hyperlinks is so light that you can hardly make out that these three options even do exist. A similar color can be found on the labels below the post titles as well. Again, you can barely see the labels now.

Other changes which we could spot in this new user interface included materialisation of the button designs and the name of the author showing up right next to the title bar.

Google has also hinted that over the coming months Blogger will be bound to a few more overhauls which will make the platform "faster, easier to use and more beautiful". Taking into consideration that most websites of Google products now feature the material design, we are quite confident about the fact that Blogger is heading in the same direction.

Source: Official Blogger Blog

Krittin Kalra

Krittin Kalra is a 20 year old Android freak. Striving for passions, chasing down his dreams and living a life without regrets is his sole mantra. A bit moody, he also does custom ROM reviews for AndroGuider. Currently pursuing his B.Tech, he aspires to follow his heart.