Your Blog Just Got an All New Makeover!

When Data married Design.

Watching thousands of blogs being used by millions across the globe is our daily grind. Observing, analysing, tuning and improving has always been an adrenaline rush for us.

Based on this data and feedback over the past couple of months, we’ve been engineering a massive change in the way you, the blogger’s readers are consuming the articles. We are pretty sure you’ll be excited to see these changes.

Over the course of the next few days your blog will have a new navigation experience designed to keep users engaged, share more and an admin experience for you to get a lot more contextual.

Let’s get into the details.

Before I show you how the new experience is, here’s how it’s been in the past.

We had a right bottom toolbar for follow, comments, likes and the Cucumbertown icon.

And when you scroll down and up you’d see the overlay that show for social icon

And finally the top toolbar that irritated a lot of you folks but was a treasure trove of functionality.

Here’s what’s new

The follow button is now more prominent and the “like” button has been moved out to the center. With ads and all the clutter that we couldn’t control, it was difficult to grab attention to get people to follow you. And that changes now.

Notifications has taken a whole new level of importance

Speaking of attention, we’ve had complaints from people not being able to access comments section. Somehow the comment box in the footer was blinding. We have now removed the ambiguity. Comments have moved to the content layout section.

And if for some reason if you miss the floating navigator, all of them will have a fixed position at the end of the post.

Which takes us to an important point. Share buttons have now become first class citizens. Earlier accessing shares on the right bottom required you to click the “like” button. This was impeding discoverability.

With this flow, the top most share icons are default by visible and hover shows the other icons. The experience is much more implicit on mobile.

Now for some blogger love.

The admin bar on mobile used to take up major real estate on the top and hide elements. It’s moved down to the section instead of follow for the author :

that opens up to a side panel:

Notice, that you can do just about anything to the blog content here and it features a very simple analytics section for each page

Finally, clicking on the right bottom most icon pops up more info about Cucumbertown. In past we’ve had several experiences where anonymous users while signing trying to comment had a jarring experience trying to figure out how Cucumbertown showed up in the scheme of things.

Hopefully this is a much more graceful experience.

Of course all these are designed mobile first. So take a look at it!

You’ll inevitably hit some bugs and we are watching very closely fixing them pronto.

We had a very humbling and enlightening experience designing this massive change. And I am sure you’ll love this change, as much as we do!