Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> LawPundit

Legal Commentary

: LawPundit

New Blogger Interface Soon To be Forced upon Bloggers by Google is a Design Flop Contrary to Author Interests

By Andis Kaulins

Google's official Blogger blog has announced a new Blogger interface
soon to be forced upon Blogger portal bloggers.

Thank you, but no thank you.
We have looked at it.
The new interface is nothing for us.

As a result, even though we have been with Blogger from its first beginnings,
we will have little choice but to transfer our main blog(s) to a different blogger platform soon.

On top of our list right now is WordPress,
and we looked at FirstSiteGuide.com and Anya Skrba's
How To Move Your Blog From Blogger To WordPress: Step by Step Guide 2020
as also looking at the WordPress guides at WPBeginner.com.
Eusteacia has a nice writeup with links to numerous useful plugins at
Moving from Blogger to WordPress with WP Beginner (Review).

After doing some additional reading online, the solution that we found as the simplest for us -- and we are trying this out at the moment -- is to use the "Back up Content" button function in Blogger (found in "Settings" under the menu item "Other"), which backs up an entire blog into an xml file. That xml file can then be imported by drag and drop into a wordpress.com blog with the Wordpress.com "import" function (found under "Tools" in the WordPress.com user dashboard). Later added Note: Success! In just about 1/2 hour, this procedure was completed in importing nearly 1000 postings, comments and media to LawPundit WP at WordPress.com, where we will continue posting LawPundit posts in the future. For continuity, we will post at both locations until a final decision is made.

We have no idea who is in charge of the design of the new Blogger interface,
but it is hard to believe it is anyone who has ever blogged or understands much about blogging. More likely marketing types designing for ad placements.

The user interface has been over-simplified (dumbed down) to such a degree that it is virtually useless for practical serious blogging. The rationale appears to be to make Blogger better adapted to mobile use, a mobile world where ephemeral "non-content" and invasive advertising dominate.

In the new Blogger interface, Blog postings that do not have an embedded image get an overly large but meaningless alphabet letter assigned at the front of the title, letters which dominate the entire page to the detriment of far more important things, such as the actual name of the blogger or the full title of a posting.

Indeed, the posting blogger's name is reduced to only the first few letters of the name in tiny script, showing how much importance Google assigns to authors.

Moreover, get ready to click considerably more to find the same features that you once found and used easily and really need to blog effectively. Now these are all hidden behind a blank and blinding white interface that just takes up a lot of empty space that could be used for something sensible. Blank is blank.

On a scale of 0 to 10 with zero at the bottom, we rank the new Blogger interface at 0, a rank meaning "not worth the trouble", "forget it".

Full post as published by LawPundit on May 28, 2020 (boomark / email).