Google's Blogger gets new look and new features
Blogger may only have a mere 2.9 percent share of the content management system market but it’s still looking after its users, by the looks of it.
On Wednesday it announced details of a major overhaul to the Blogger interface, the first big refresh for quite a while. The news came by way of a post on its Blogger Buzz blog, with product manager Chang Kim discussing the new look.
“It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics,” Kim wrote in the post.
He continued, “We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you — and easier for us to update and improve over time.”
Among the changes detailed, the post editor has been expanded and simplified, says Kim. This will give users of Google’s Blogger a bigger canvas for drafting and previewing work.
A new Overview section has been added, enabling users to “quickly get a pulse for how people are reacting to your blog with a graph of your most recent traffic numbers, comment activity and follower counts.”
The new interface is being rolled out gradually to Blogger users, though it won’t suddenly appear next time you log in – users will be asked whether or not they wish to enable the new UI. “Over the next few days, keep an eye out for a pop-up announcement on your dashboard with instructions on how to get started,” Kim said in the post.
According to Kim, Wednesday’s updates are the first in a series of big changes to be rolled out over the next few months.
Blogger launched in 1999 and was bought by Google four years later. The blogging platform once led the field, but over the years WordPress has established itself as top dog. Today WordPress commands just over 54 percent of the content management system market, as opposed to Blogger’s 2.9 percent.
The overhaul of Blogger could be the company’s way of telling its users “We are still here and we haven’t forgotten about you, so please don’t switch over to WordPress.”
