A few of these new interface overhauls require option adjustments, so we’ll tell you exactly how you can give them a test drive. However, the rest of them are right there in the open and ready for you to use. Some of these have been around for a little while longer than others, but this should serve as a good round-up for what you might have been missing out on.

Search

Google’s most basic tool that brought it fame and fortune – its search engine – has received a basic revamp that heavily incorporates a black unibar that provides quick access to your Google+ account. Furthermore, the traditional sidebar displays a brand new distinct red and black design. These are just simple theme changes, so you won’t be seeing anything totally different, and the theme itself is used with most other Google products (such as Google Maps), effectively bringing all of these tools together.

In addition to these graphical changes, the Google search function has recently implemented a few Chrome-only features such as voice search, a Tineye-like image search, and Instant Page. You can read more about these functions with this MakeUseOf news article – Google Adds More Innovative Search Features.

Calendar

Here’s one of latest Google design changes that you may or may have not already accessed. You can change the look of Google Calendar by simply going to your options at the top right corner of the Google unibar and clicking “Try the new look”. The tool will function exactly like the Google Calendar that you know and love, and on top of that, it looks a whole lot nicer. Granted, you can always revert to the old layout by going through the same process.

As far as functionality goes, you may want to make use of the calendar’s Appointment Slot feature. It’s a fairly simple function, and it is designed for others to open up a personalized URL that you provide, view a pre-selected section of your personal calendar, and request appointments by selecting specific time blocks. In addition to this, users can see what times other individuals have blocked off for appointments. You can access it by setting up an event on the weekly view of your calendar.

Gmail

If you want to dive into Google’s new look using Gmail, you should go to your options, click “Mail Settings”, and then select the “Themes” tab. At the very bottom of the theme selection, you will be able to find two recently-added ones – “Preview” and “Preview (Dense)”. Both options reflect Google’s products-wide theme changes, but the latter seems to place lines of text closer together (think double-space versus single-space). The design’s goal is to provide a less cluttered page space, and although it succeeds in doing this, Gmail provides no new real options to play with.

YouTube

The new YouTube user interface – dubbed Cosmic Panda – features a cinema-style display as well as four templates for your personal channel. Each template coordinates with what kind of user that you may happen to be whether that is a creator, a blogger, a network, or even someone that just likes to post a little bit of everything.

You may have already noticed that YouTube’s remote player has a sleek black-themed design that provides a nice neutral color when posting on website. However, you can try out the rest of the on-site features by going here and clicking “Try Now”. For more info, check out YouTube “Cosmic Panda” Revamp Now Available To Try.

Blogger

As I’ve said before, Blogger is the way to go if you are creating a personal blog due to its low-cost domains and fully-customizable designs. However, if you have used WordPress or Tumblr, you probably are aware that Blogger just doesn’t seem to be up to par with its main user interface. That can be a real turn-off for some potential users, and that is understandable.

As mentioned previously on MakeUseOf, Google has provided a feature entitled “Blogger In Draft” which enforces a total graphical overhaul to the Blogger user interface. Presenting itself as a feature that is merely being tested, the interface can be accessed by simply going to <draft.blogger.com/home> and opting to make it your default view of Blogger. This too is just a design change, so don’t expect anything more than just a pretty face. However, the one element that I truly appreciated was the much cleaner post editing area that takes up most of the browser window.

Conclusion

Google’s invasion of new user interfaces has yet to end, so be on the look-out for more products and products redux. If you’d like to take another peek at other Google projects-in-the-making, be sure to take a gander at MakeUseOf’s Other Google Labs That Will Help To Keep You Informed About Google Developments.

What are your favorite Google makeovers? Which ones could you do without? What existing features could be improved upon?

If you are a Blogger user, you may have occasionally wondered, “How can I make one of those crazy-cool contact forms that all the other blogs in the world have?” Fortunately, if you are also a Google Docs user, this can be done with relative ease (and absolutely no pain).

Making The Form

To begin, log in to Google Docs, and create a new form as shown by the image below. You can punch in a title for your form to keep yourself organized, but you could actually leave this section of your form as “Untitled” and it wouldn’t make any difference. In order to make it a legitimate contact page, you should provide users with the “paragraph text” question type. This allows enough room for lengthy questions or comments.

Please take note that the default form automatically inserts two sample questions. Make sure to delete the second sample, or else you will have a phantom inquiry that you don’t really need. However, if you want to add more questions using different answer formats (checkboxes, multiple choice, etc.) then you are free to do so. You can even make the answers required for items such as contact details. After you are done, make sure you remember to save it.

Ripping The Form

You may already be aware that Google forms tend to stick to non-customizable templates that often don’t mesh well with your blog’s design. Sure, you can embed the form using an iFrame code, but it still retains the same format as the pre-designed cookie-cutter templates. Thankfully, there is a way around that.

After completing your form, go back to your Docs homepage and open up the spreadsheet of the form you have just created. As a side-note, this spreadsheet will allow you to see all the submissions to your form. When you arrive on this page, select “Form” on the menu bar and then click “Go to live form“.

While looking at your form page, you should use whatever feature your browser allows for looking at the page source code. Since I am using Chrome on my Mac for this tutorial, I merely used my trackpad to open the contextual menu and selected “View Page Source“.

Right here, things might get tedious, so pay close attention. You should use the Find function of your browser (CTRL + F) to locate the term “form action“. When you find it, you should see this code:

<div class="ss-form><form action="YOUR_FORM_URL" method="POST" id="ss-form">

Make a note of where this line of code is, and then find this next bit of code:

</script></div>

Copy all the way down from the first mentioned line of code to the next mentioned line of code. If you would feel more comfortable pasting this code in a text app, then go ahead. You will be using it momentarily.

Installing The Form

After you have successfully copied your selected code to your clipboard, you should go into your Blogger dashboard. As I said before, I am using the Blogger in Draft interface, but if you are using the original UI, you will still be able to follow along.

First off, you should create a new page for your blog and entitle it “Contact Me” or something similar. After opening it, go directly to the HTML editing section of the page and paste the code.

As of now, you have basically completed the task of installing the form on your blog. At this point, your preview should look similar to the image below. However, previews are going to be different for different people based on the machine they are using.

Customizing The Form

As I discovered with my personal blog, sometimes there will be problems such as there being too much space between the page title and the form itself or the answer box being too big for the width of the blog. These minor problems can be easily fixed.

If you are having issues with there being too much space between the title and the questions, search for any

br

tags and delete them. However, if you are having issues with the width of the answer box, search for this line of code:

<textarea name="entry.0.single" rows="8" cols="75" class="ss-q-long" id="entry_0">

By adjusting the “cols” value to a lesser number, you can change the width of the blog to suit smaller screens or alternate browsers. Furthermore, you can actually change the fonts of the questions while editing the page. With enough customization, you can end up with something like the following image.

Conclusion

This is a quick and efficient way to place a style-matching Google Docs form on your Blogger blog, and the tutorial could likely be adapted for any other blog or website. You can do a lot more than what you see here, so make sure you play around with it for a little while.

What other sites do you use to make web forms? How did this tutorial work out for you?  If you have any problems making your own web form, let us know in the comments or alternatively ask a question over at MakeUseOf Answers.

While getting many people to visit your blog is fairly achievable, turning them into loyal visitors is a bit more tricky. Producing great content is one way to achieve that. But you need more than quality content to keep your readers coming back for more. You need to entice them, and PunchTab might help you to do that.

Packing The First Punch

The idea behind PunchTab is more or less similar to the Facebook fan gate concept: you ask visitors to do something and reward them for it. If you can make the actions and rewards interesting enough, your readers will come back for more.

You have two options after signing up with the service. The first one is setting up a loyalty marketing program, and the second one is running a one time giveaway. Let’s look at the options one by one.

To start a loyalty program, click the “Begin” button.

Begin by choosing the type of site you have, then decide on the location of the “Reward” tab.

There are several types of site that you can choose from including Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress. Since all of my blogs are powered by WordPress, I chose it from the list.

Upon clicking the “Submit” button, PunchTab will generate a key for you. You’ll need to input the key in your site later.

WordPress users can download and install the PunchTab plugin directly from within their admin area.

To enter the key, go to the PunchTab settings menu.

Other than the key field, you can also adjust the location of the “Reward” tab.

The Reward tab will appear on your blog at the location that you’ve specified.

If your visitor clicks the “Reward” tab, they will see the pop-up reward window, and they will go through the process that you’ve set to get the reward.

Managing The Rewards

You can give virtually any kind of rewards for your visitors. You can manage these rewards by clicking on the “Manage Rewards” button next to “Loyalty Program Settings“.

Create your own reward by filling in the brand and type of reward that you want to give.

Set the number of points needed to redeem the reward and click the “Add Reward” button.

All the rewards that you’ve created are listed on the reward table below. You can trash the reward(s) using the delete button.

Give Away The Second Punch

Besides the loyalty program, you can also create a one time giveaway. This type of incentive giving is perfect for contests or a time limited bonus.

There are several fields you should fill in when creating the giveaway. Start with the name, description, and URL of a specific blog post.

Then continue to questions, Facebook page, and the end date. If you have a Facebook fan page, use the URL here.

You can see how the “Giveaway Ticket” will look on the preview.

The last step is copying the generated code snippet and pasting it in the HTML mode of your blog post.

There are many things that you can give as a reward to your readers, either in the loyalty program or as a one time giveaway, for example: (PDF) e-books, special short courses, exclusive memberships, shopping coupons, or even physical goods like mousepads, mugs, t-shirts, etc.

I think that if you are serious in your blogging business, you should consider using methods like PunchTab to build your loyal visitors. What do you think? Do you have any other ideas on how to keep them coming back for more?  If so, please share your opinions using the comments below.

Image credit: Zoom Zoom

The dashboard interface has been redesigned to be more modern and user-friendly, giving easy access to statistics, layout editing and useful features for writing new blog posts. Google used their Google Web Toolkit to create the new interface, showcasing just how powerful the Web Toolkit really is.

Compare these screenshots of the old Blogger dashboard and the new dashboard.

See also the difference between the old Blogger post editor and the new post editor.

Google has also released a content discovery tool, which determines the content of the Blogger page you’re reading and suggests related material you might also enjoy.

Check out Blogger’s promotional video to see examples of some of the new features in action.

In a recent study of popular blogging platforms, Blogger was praised for flawless uptime statistics and therefore proving itself to be the most reliable free blogging platform. Do you agree? Or do you think that WordPress can’t be beaten?

Source: TechCrunch

GoDaddy won by a very small margin on 23%; Blue Host got 22% of the votes; HostGator was third on 15%; iPage 6%; Web Hosting Pad 6%; Just Host 5%; IX Web Hosting 4%. The rest received under 4% each.

Full results and this week’s poll after the jump.

There were also some great suggestions in the comments, such as Dreamhost and Speech.net.

This week’s poll question is: Blogger Vs WordPress “” Which Is The Best Free Hosted Blog Service?