I think this is a massive improvement on the front page and it allows you to easily scan the first 5 lenses in each Squidoo category.

However, after showing it around a bit I heard a little criticism and I tend to agree with what I’ve heard. As you scroll down the new homepage, it’s very difficult to focus on any specific category.

There’s a lot of text that isn’t separated out in any appreciable way.

Here’s the two ways I think you can fix it.

1) add a tiny logo next to each category like a little skyscraper for business or a picture of a flower for Home and Gardening.

2) make the background of the title for each category a bit darker or find some other way to separate each category graphically.

Besides those minor gripes, I think it’s a great idea and I really hope that Squidoo continues to tweak and refine it over the next few months.

What do you guys think?

The entire interface was upgraded on the backend to use the wordpress 2.x style engine over the previous 1.x engine.

The front end has changed drastically with some major overhauls and feature updates that should make users really happy.

You can now ‘Squidtop Surf‘ and be taken to a random Squidtop blog straight from the homepage.

A larger selection of themes are available for users and you can use more customization than with the previous design to really make your blog your own.

Several of the plugins that allow Squidtop to be super useful for getting Squidoo News and posts found by people and search engines alike were re-written to run a bit faster and cleaner.

A new anti-spam suite was also installed that should help the permanent wave of spam that flows everywhere.

If you haven’t checked Squidtop out yet or if you’ve been thinking about starting a blog but were looking for a dead simple way to do it, check it out.

What other improvements do you think Squidtop could make?