Beta turns better
blog.co.uk to appear in new look and feel on Monday
After a long period of restless coding and developing we´re proud to present blog.co.uk in a new look and feel on Monday afternoon.
What´s new, what does change for you and what makes it "better" ?
1. better software
We´ve made a fundamental change to our software architecture. This change will allow us to move forward faster in the future and react faster to your suggestions and comments. It was painful not being able to implement your ideas and actually postponing some of them and instead re-structure the whole software framework instead. But we´re convinced it was the right way to go and are looking forward to implementing some nice improvements in the near future.
2. better colors
We´ve received many complaints regarding the little contrast of text and other elements on blog.co.uk. Therefore, we got rid of the color scheme and introduced a new one. We hope you like it.
3. better content
There´s a lot of good content around on blog.co.uk. But most of us will miss a lot of this content if we do not happen to stumble upon it by chance. Since we believe these treasures should see some more daylight, we´re about to create a "Topics" section where we intend to highlight the most popular topics and show the best content across all media forms on those pages. This, we believe, will make the whole site more worthwhile to hang around on and will give more bloggers more exposure and traffic.
We have launched a pilot of the topic sites on the blog.co.uk sister site www.blog.de. You may want to have a look and jump into the fourth main tab called "Themen" (Topics) in the top navigation. You´ll find 3 topics there for now: "love", "life" and "politics" which are very popular topics on the German site.
Aside from this, we´ve improved community features such as member search, improved the profile pages, and expanded the media section. More serious feature improvement will take place in the near future.
We believe that we have a made a big promising step forward in order to make blog.co.uk in every way better for you and are looking forward to making it even much better in the future. We hope you will survive the adaption phase and await your comments. Thank you for all suggestions, patience and participation. Enjoy !
Comments (34)
Yes, good
But when exactly do we get the changes on the UK servers?
It would be good if there was a TAB for "Writing" or "Authors" so that people who post creative writing, short stories, serials and articles can have better publicity. Such postings have a long life and may be drawing hits for years as new readers find them.
Changes will go online in a few hours already.
Thank you for that suggestion on the "Writing" Tabs. The tabs are indeed a pilot and we are elaborating on certain scenarios which could become available in the near future.
Can I just say it's looking good, loving the new design which removes a lot of the white that dominated the homepage
I am wondering how soon it'll be before the various posts start debating how to get on to the four 'featured blogs'
Thank you for this ! The whole team is so happy that the feedback is extremely positive across all sites, they´ve really coded and designed their hearts out and it´s the hottest day of the year today in Berlin
Haha, lucky you, I can report Devon is cold and cloudy
If I can be a slight party pooper and say one thing, I know personally if clicking the blog link in the top left of the main page or on an individual blog I think I'd prefer it to go to the "my blog" section rather than the main homepage, it just ads an extra click into navigation when their personal page will probably be the desired homepage for most people.
Is there the potential of having these link to the "my blog" section rather than the main homepage?
That's not to detract from the good work done so far
Good point there. The main page will definately stay but putting the "my blog" section somewhere up there is definately another recommendation worth looking at
I like the idea of the topics.
Could I suggest "News Debate", too?
Oh, and "Humour".
Oh, and........ etc etc!
Looks great though!
I found a bug in italian Blogs.it:
if you make a log-in from the home page of a friend blog, your login missed, and you lost the page of the friend blog.
Also gotta say that I'm interested in the idea of the 'Topics' tab. May I be so bold as to suggest 'Gaming' as a topic? (Gosh, I wonder where a suggestion like that would come from...)
Good stuff chaps and chapettes.
Apart from being unable to access or add to my blog any more (computer keeps crashing and saying ' incorrect login password' or some such phrase), this new system is absolutely marvellous. The old system (which seemed to work almost perfectly) was obviously rubbish.
I have one eye look at a blog . There is no new ideas in internet! We decided to issue not more than 1 new project in three month. The the situation appears as follows the big internet companies do not want to invest money in new they think better use spam, take idea or copy design. It`s hard to stay the best site and create.
I like it a lot.
Great improvement.
Mow, about this smoking ban...
Yes, the 'Topics/Themes' idea is a good one.
And I also think the idea of a 'Newsletter' being sent out to bloggers, every now and then is a good idea too. I've hardly ever seen a Newsletter from you guys before.
Congratulations on the site and all your hard work.
Wifey
Thank you wifey, we will definately intensify the work on the newsletter and on this blog in the near future.
Yes , I too agree ..
'Topic/themes' would be good.
rammy
i like the colour change.
it suits my skin tones.
overall, very pleased with the improvements, so well done blog people!
Thanks Kevin. We´ll try our best to improve on other areas aside from your skin tones as well :-) Best, Vasco
Hi
I like the look of the site. However, I am finding it difficult to participate since its changed!
I open the site and rapidly my Mac closes the site down. I did not have this problem prior to the site changing.
Can you help please!
I've just tried to tell you it closes Safari down too but didn't like the text? So I had to edit out of my last blog entry here. Weird?
A very improved, goodlooking site! Congratulations!
Now that blog.co.uk has improved its image, now its time to improve the bloggers webpages!
Nothing was added for the bloggers to improve their webpages, it is still the same old design lay-outs. Blog.co.uk should develop more flexible and innovative layouts to choose from, especially for the pro-users with Google Ads. The present design layouts does not allow much flexibility in placing the Ads but still maintain a good looking webpages! We have a choice of 2 or 3 columns and that's it! There are no multiple rows (horizontal spaces) where we could alternate Ads and blogs, therefore limiting Ads sizes to the restricted vertical column spaces!
The Top Blogs rating must be done based on the traffic or the number of visitors or pageviews the site generate not on the number of comments, as some of these top sites can have 2 or 3 visitors exchanging comments, in which the owners comments are also included.
I don't know the basis for criteria for choosing which blog to display for featured blogs. Featured blogs must be the most visited (not the most comments) blogs in different features such as politics, religion, science, arts (drawings, illustrations, images, architecture, literature), music, international blogs for members outside uk, general topics as daily life blogging, alternative lifestyles!
Best Regards,
Davij
Hello Davij,
very useful feedback here, thank you.
Number one:
yes, you are absolutely correct with the webpages. This is step 2 and what we are working on right now. This relaunch mainly focused on a new software architecure and on surfacing good content.
We are very aware of the fact that we need to improve on designs dramatically, to say the least. We are working on this, this is our 2nd big step. We are also aware of the fact that we need to open up our design tools to global user talent and that talented people need to be able to create great designs and share them with others.
Backend-redesign is scheduled to come straight after this one.
The changes are nice, but only cosmetic. There doesn't really seem to be any new functionality. Blogger allows me to add all sorts of widgets to my page from many different third party providers. Can you not do something like that?
Hi worandbooks,
yes, we are. As stated on the above comment, we needed to improve software architecture in a fundamental way first. This was vital for future development. What you mention is step 2 and 3. I cannot promise any specific time frames, but blog templates and design possibilities are next (Q3, most likely). You may want to check out the comment I made above.
Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. We really appreciate your participation.
IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE THAT OUR BOLG GET NEW COLOR AND NEW TREND- KEEP MOVING AHEAD-LET US JOIN TOGETHER TO BOND THE WORLD OF AGONY AND DISPAIR INTO LOVING AND CONTENT PLANET FOR ANOTHER MILLION YEARS TO COME- SO THE GENERATIONS WILL THINK AND THANK THAT SOME BODY DID A GOOD JOB EARLIER
THANK U FOR UR MAIL
Pretty tall order. But we´ll do our best. All the best and thank you for your comment.
I like the new design too!
One thing I have to complain about, though: I keep getting logged off. Don't know if it has anything to do with me using Firefox and not IE, but it needs fixing.
Another thought: just looked at the "Themen" on the German blog. The idea to add "Populäre Interessen" and "Populäre Städte" is great!
I'm not convinced of the "Populäre User" sections, though, because it separates the users into a popular "upper class" and into an apparently unpopular "lower class". And shouldn't all bloggers be equal in blogland?
Further topics such as the aforementioned "News debates", "Humour", etc. would indeed be good. Who decides, though, which blogs to feature? How will you make sure that a variety of blogs are featured, and not just a few (and the same) blogs all the time?
Ok, ok, I finally found "popular interests" and "popular cities" on BCUK too...
Regarding the firefox-issue: check cookie-settings, which should be activated. Otherwise, the firefox browser is the browser we actually optimize for. It should´nt produce problems. But may try considering upgrading, if you haven´t done so yet. I am also using version 2.0.0.5, which runs fine.
Content: content on the topics pages is generated automatically for now. Relevant factors are links from other sites on the net pointing to your blog, pageviews, number of different user comments, number of posts.
The trouble with using comments as part of the rating is that inane rubbish conversations tend to get a higher rating than original content.
Only 10% of bloggers produce original content, the rest just recycle or bleat like sheep about how bored they are.
Original content often has a longer shelf-life than other stuff and postings may still be attracting hits years after being made. This should be taken into account.
Would it be possible to add a 5 starts "user rating" for the posts in addition to comments?
And a category of "best rated posts" we could add in our blog page as we do with "archive, tags..."
That would be just perfect then!
While it is fine to give a new look to your blog site, I think members feeling of your service is as important. i have noticed that it is easy to receive newsletters, be charged for being a pro user but you fail to reply to email complaints.
I decided to inform you that I will not be renewing my contract when the present one expires but have failed to receive any confirmation of receipt.
i have tried informing through your newslwtter and came back unreturned.
i have tried the blog area without any response.
I have therefore decided to use this medium as a last option.
I know it may not appear online because it might be removed.
The point remans that it will get to you and hopefully act by taking note that I DO NOT WISH TO CONTINUE PAYING AND WILL WANT THE PRESENT CONTRACT TERMINATED AT ITS EXPIRATION.
I'm a bit lost - I've had 36 hours away and find I don't have my own page but some other page from which I can't link to my page that has my friends and with my chosen design of blog page. I have had just 5 minutes, but I really do not know how to find my way in to do what I want to do.
Please do not use post ratings, other people's views of what creates a 1-5 star post is invidious and can be offensive and upsetting. The neutral approach to this is best and works for the majority of people. We can all look at posts that please us and the same post will not be a pleasure to others.
Good Luck with your changes,
BrianClarkeNUJ
Very interesting
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