Google's Blogger gets a refresh
A set of major user interface changes--from edit tools to management--is coming to the Web-blogging service.
Blogger is rolling out a site-wide refresh today.
It's the first major overhaul of the Web-blogging service in several years. Details on the new look and feel, along with key feature updates, can be found on Blogger Buzz, the official voice of Blogger. Apparently, after taking into consideration a plethora of user feedback, "the entire editing and management experience" has been "rewritten from scratch" making the overall user experience "faster and more efficient."
Among the most significant changes: The post editor now gives users "a larger canvas for drafting and previewing" their work. Traffic data, including the latest traffic counts, number of followers, and comment activity will be delivered in a graph, which is located in the new "overview" area of Blogger's dashboard.
In typical Google fashion, the company is just starting to roll out these new features, and not every Blogger user will see the changes immediately. Users can, however, start toying with the new UI as soon as a pop-up window appears on the dashboard with instructions. And there's more: expect additional "major updates" to the Blogger experience in coming months.
This is good news for the free Web-blogging service. It has some catching up to do. WordPress, Blogger's top competitor, is on fire. As the Web's most popular content management system, WordPress owns 54.3 percent of the market compared to just 2.9 percent for Blogger, according to a recent study by Web Technology Surveys. Astonishingly, over 100,000 new WordPress blogs are created daily with open-source software tools--and there are 56,404,558 WordPress sites around the globe. The eight-year-old company, founded by San Francisco-based Web developer Matt Mullenweg (a former CNET employee), hosts about half of those blogs. Read more on his always colorful personal blog.