I was briefly tempted to have a dalliance with dynamic views for blogger and I did turn it on for a while. However I made the decision that it had to go. I have changed for now to a template for blogger that I’ve made myself and uploaded – this template at the moment is a bit basic and I will be working on improving that but at least I feel I have a little more control over the layout and being confident on how each user is going to view my blog.
I’m not saying that the dynamic view setting is bad but if you already have content in your blog it does not necessarily mean that everything is going to just throw up looking awesome and you may be required to change your blogging style, size of images, placement etc. to obtain a good look.
The dynamic view for blogger can create seven new ways to view your blog and for me that all got a bit hectic to ensure they all looked good. In addition the gadgets supported in Dynamic Views currently include: Blog Archive, Followers, Labels, Profile, Subscribe so if you are currently using a traditional template and change to Dynamic Views, supported gadgets will automatically appear on your blog. However other groovy little gadgets you may have grown fond of will be lost and I like playing with gadgets and adding blocks of html to my blog – so for me this was a huge downer.
So ultimately I have to be in agreement with Jonathan Eisen who also dabbled but reverted too.
If you do fancy it there is a bit of support out there for customisation if you are willing to get stuck into a bit of coding. Here is a way to always display the sidebar for example. If you are looking for a whole heap of tips on the dynamic views on blogger then a great resource must be Southern Speakers with a bunch of tutorials. if you are going to plan for a site using dynamic views then this is some real worthwhile reading.
I’d love to know of any blogs where you think the blogger dynamic view has been really successful be it on your own site or one which you would recommend.
Sources of Information Used to Create This Post – thank you
Dynamic Views: seven new ways to share your blog with the worldDynamic Views: Update #3 - Gadgets!
Always Display The Sidebar On Blogger Dynamic Views Templates ...
You Can Now Use Blogger Dynamic View on Mobile!
The Tree of Life: Google/ Blogger "Dynamic Views" - Fancy but limited
Disable Certain Dynamic Views in Blogger | Southern Speakers v3.0