Participate in improving Blogger.com!

Google's Product Ideas Team asks for ôur wishes and requests to improve Blogger.com. They did that last year as well and, wow, a couple of months later the hibernation status of Blogger.com suddenly ended. Of course, Blogger.com always improved over time, but since early 2010 things started to change rapidly and the improvements have been huge.

So now it's "Round 2". And my biggest three wishes are

1. more flexibility and options to customise the menu bar (more in this follow up post)
2. conditional page elements, which allow to set "if" options when certain elements should be displayed. Those settings could be done on the dashboard "Page Elements" for elements and gadgets as well as within the gadgets. Such conditional page elements allow to create custom pages (including the homepage / homeUrl) as well as contextual gadgets. I described that in more detail in a previous post.
3. A possibility to offer 3rd party tools and services for Blogger.com like an appstore, incl checkout and licensing (default is free and open source, services can use Google checkout). That includes the ability to offer "admin" gadgets which can be selected in the same way as normal gadgets. Therefore no need to manipulate the HTML code anymore for powerusers. Those "admin" gadgets allow for example 
1. to include code in the Head section as well as 
2. extend the CSS default options for 3rd parties to add options (such as a URL for the background rather then uploading the image)
3. allow the user to save and keep templates, his own customised templates as well as 3rd party ones...

I have a lot more wishes, but those are details compared to my top 3.

Templates

You can start manipulating your blogger site layout by chossing first a standart blogger template and then modifying it to your own taste and for the pupose of the site.

Trick One
Try to find your favourite websites, which suits
your structure
your layout tastes
the kind of content

We don't recommend to copy the content of your favourite website, merely trying to analyse why you like it, why your are regularly coming back and read it.  This might be great help, because very often the initial concept of the site is often first driven by visuals whereas many websites have a great success, many visitors and most importantly readers DESPITE the visual (non-)appeal.  To simply create a visually attractive site does not automatically attract visitors and customers, despite the die-hard believe of marketing departments and advertising agencies.  Just as we usually don't buy a house because the facade is nice when the rest is not.

The visial layout is therefore less important than a good structured template.  The graphical elements can be replaced and adapted.  If the template is complex and cryptic it might be difficult to adapt.

A quick check can be done with the firefox plugin "web developer bar".  Using that you can visualise many of the CSS elements.  Too many overlapping CSS boxes might indicate that the designer (or Blogger migration coder) has not done a clean CSS job.

If you plan to use Blogger as a CMS-like website, why not starting to search for blogger templates with menus or multi-column templates.  Some of the code you need to have for your website is then already integrated.