Jeffrey Veen and I will be conducting a one-day workshop in San Francisco a week from Monday, the 8th of November: Redesigning Blogger. We’ll be covering the process and thinking we used when Adaptive Path and Stopdesign worked with Google to simplify and redesign Blogger earlier this year. Jeff and I have worked together for a little over eight years now. We’ve learned a lot from each other, and from our successes and failures on various projects. We certainly didn’t always do the right thing at HotWired, making many mistakes while we were constantly experimenting. continued

While stationed in Washington, D.C., enjoying Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week, I’ll point out another project in which Stopdesign played a small role. Google recently launched another new feature for hosted-blogs that further improves the design and experience for Blogger’s users and all of their readers. In a bold move that meets a long-standing request by many of its users, Google recently removed the awkward ads on Blogspot-hosted blogs. In the ad’s place, a new, much slimmer navigation bar gets tucked into the top of the browser window, adding functionality to each blog continued

The subject is covered frequently in the blogosphere. It’s nothing new for many of you. I’ve been bitten by Stopdesign’s Google page rank for specific search queries several times. I just noticed the most recent instance. When John Gruber published “Writing for Google” earlier this month, he provided advice for getting a good rank for one page or article so those seeking its content are likely to find it. Follow his advice for content you want people to find.

There’s a flip side to this issue though. What happens when Google gives a particular page too high a page rank? continued

For those of us involved in the project, we’ve been waiting months for this day to come. At long last, I’m proud to announce the launch of a project representing the latest collaboration between Stopdesign and Adaptive Path: the redesign of Blogger.com. Congratulations to the entire Blogger team on completing hundreds of hours, and expending tremendous effort to fit so much into this launch. This is Blogger’s first major overhaul since getting acquired by Google in February 2003, and it’s a biggie. continued

In the current Google Age, we tend to default our web searching to one tool which finds what we’re looking for every time. Many of us subconsciously believe Google is the answer to Bono’s soul-seeking lyrics from 1987. With such a prominent player in the field, it’s easy to dismiss the improvement efforts of other search engines as inconsequential. Everyone seems to be stripping it down, playing catch-up to Google. Why would we make the effort to switch our search engine of choice when we haven’t seen much innovation for some time now? continued