29 Blogger Buster - Relaunched! May 10, 2010 /

Those of you who have visited Blogger Buster over the past few weeks will have noticed gradual changes to the site, complete with a countdown timer to the date of relaunch.

Several weeks in the making (and still with a few tweaks to finalize), Blogger Buster's new look is finally unveiled:

About the new design

Although it seems some readers were rather fond of the old design, I felt it had become too cluttered and heavy in the context of information presentation. I wanted to clean up the overall visuals of the site, make it easy to navigate and reflect my own personality as a web designer.

As part of this redesign, I decided to re-brand Blogger Buster by incorporating a new logo and identity design by Switchcode (which will also be filtering through to my Twitter and Facebook pages):

Using conditional Blogger template tags, I've revamped the home page to offer better access to important areas of the site, and of course I now utilize Blogger's native post-summary technique which is far preferable to my previous preferred method.

Being somewhat fanatical about CSS, I've also introduced some CSS3 techniques to enhance the overall visuals of the site in supporting browsers:

While best viewed in Chrome or Firefox 3.6+, these techniques are degradable to ensure this site can be viewed in all browsers. However, I no longer support IE6 in my designs (and neither do the Blogger team!).

If you are among the unfortunate few to still be using this archaic browser, please please please upgrade to a modern means of browsing the web! (And here are even more reasons to upgrade from IE6 in case my pleas hadn't already convinced you.).

New articless in progress...

Though the Blogger team have added many new features during my hiatus, I've managed to stay up-to-date. While working on other web projects I have discovered loads of new techniques and Blogger template adaptations which I'll be sharing with you all over the forthcoming weeks including:

• Why Blogger is a kick-ass CMS!
• Designing for Blogger's new Template Designer
• How to create a business website with Blogger
• Using non-standard fonts for your Blogger-based design
• ...and much more!

Please feel free to let me know if there are any particular tutorials you'd like me to cover and I'll do my best to write on the most popular suggestions.

Soon to be accepting Blogger design projects!

After freelancing my web design skills for the past few months, I've decided to take the leap and offer my skills with Blogger and will be accepting requests for new projects in the next few weeks.

I'm currently updating my portfolio and working out the details but feel free to contact me if you'd like to know more.

What's your opinion of the new Blogger Buster design?

I'd love to know what you think about Blogger Buster's relaunch, so please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below.