Mark Boulton

Yester­day saw the relaunch of Blog­ger. All the “Web Stand­ards” blogs out there were thick with praise for this redesign (I guess most of them don’t actu­ally see bey­ond Doug’s great design and the Stand­ards imple­ment­a­tion). Doug has doc­u­mented the pro­cess which has some great insights into this new launch. 

I think the real suc­cess here is the Usab­il­ity work done (and Dougs inter­pret­a­tion of the required “Ease-of-use”). The work Adapt­ive Path have done is fant­ast­ic­ally elegant. 

Good design shouldn’t be noticed. A very well design book, or news­pa­per, just works. The design doesn;t get in the way of the mes­sage. The new Blog­ger site is a won­der­ful example of this. Ease of use was of upmost import­ance, Jeff Veen points out that the Blog­ger wanted to be able to set up a blog, in three steps, in less than five minutes. Quite an undertaking. 

The regis­tra­tion pro­cess is superb, one of the best i’ve used. Ever. It’s so simple even my mother could use it (and that’s say­ing some­thing). Here’s some grabs of the pro­cess. What’s nice to see is con­tex­tual help links next to items that you may want help with.

The new Blog­ger logo is a good step on from the pre­vi­ous ver­sion and it ties in very well to the over­all “curved” look of the site. I’m not over famil­iar with the ori­ginal ver­sion of the logo, but I do know it was square, orange and blue. It’s a great logo­type though. It car­ries a lot of the brand val­ues — ease of use, approach­able etc. 

There are plenty of new tem­plates avail­able with the new Blog­ger, and all of them con­fig­ur­able from within the Blog­ger web-based interface.

The tem­plates can be seen in full here. Some great designs from Zeld­man, Bow­man and Dan Ceder­home (although there are a couple of lem­ons in there too, but maybe that’s just me).All of the tem­plates are XHTML, with CSS driven present­a­tion (as you’d expect from authors like this).