Blogger has delivered a new, cleaner look and a fully redesigned editor – a facelift that Google first promised in March. This improvement is part of ongoing efforts from Google to improve the look, feel, and design unity of their services.
The New Blogger
There have been rumors since early this year that Blogger would be getting a fairly major facelift. The details ranged across the board from minor interface tweaks to a new name (“Google Blogs”). As the new design of Blogger is released, some of those elements have been confirmed while others have been shown as fanciful rumors (notably, it’s still Blogger).
Here are the key elements of the updated interface:
- The entire user interface has been changed dramatically; much of the color scheme, placement, and navigation is unrecognizable when compared to the previous version.
- Several key Google services have been integrated more deeply into Blogger, including automatic Analytics data for blog content.
- The editor sports a cleaner look that gives fast access to key functions and that provides a wider canvas for toying with your blog entries.
- Geo-location tagging has graduated alongside the new interface.
- The editor is faster and easier for Google to update in the future. As stated on the Official Google Blog, Google has rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient.
Those who have been using Blogger in Draft have had access to many of these features for weeks now. For the rest of us, a “new interface” option at the top-right corner of Blogger allows an easy switch to the new rendition.
When Google+ was released, it had a cleaner, more mobile-friendly design that raised the bar for Google on the whole. Since then, Google’s various properties have been implementing updated, attractive interfaces that streamline user options. Several properties have new versions in the test phase, and we can expect to see more in the near future.