Blogger dashboard breakdown

I wanted to title this post Control Panel Confusion, but apparently the interface isn't a Blogger control panel it's a dashboard. Oh well, 😞.

Having got to ten posts on the blog, it's about time to start investigating the interface in a bit more depth to see what other features area available beyond the basic editing and posting tools. A web search yielded quite a few pages but most of them are written from the 'oh it's new' (it was in 2016), or 'this is how you get started', or 'this is how you do this' points of view. But there didn't seem to be a dissection of the whole system from a 'this is what all the buttons do' point of view. Here is my attempt.

Let's start with an overview of the dashboard.

On opening Blogger (and if you are signed into your Google account) you will be taken to the dashboard of the last blog that you posted from. I have broken the content down into five sections and will look at each in future posts.

Header. The current dashboard had a redesign in 2016 and the header bar was altered to make it similar in appearance to other Google products.

Posts nav bar. New post link and search tools for blog posts.

Posts body. Contains a list of each of the posts on the blog with headline information for the post and links to action items for each post.

Nav sidebar. Menu options for blog-wide content and settings pages; this is where the meat of dashboard lies.

Footer. Links to general Blogger/Google legal and user associated stuff.

The dashboard as a whole has a pretty clean design and so far I have found it pretty intuitive and easy to use. So quick tour over with, next stop will be a short post covering the header of the dashboard.

PS Since starting this post I did find a page breaking down the dashboard into sections. But it appears to have been written in 2014 so the content doesn't completely match what I am seeing. It is also a broader introduction to the dashboard than I want.

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