I’ve felt a bit like an expectant father this past couple of weeks, as we were counting down to the re-birth of Quibblo.com, our flagship product here at Pangea Media. Well, today, we gave birth to a beautiful new version of the site.

Here are some of the highlights…

A New Design:

Slick and sexy, we re-worked the color palette to mute some of the brighter colors, we added some more texture and very subtle gradients to selected areas, and we brought in more graphical elements in key places to give the site less of a text-heavy feel. We also added user images and avatars to a lot more places throughout the site to better showcase the life and activity that was happening on Quibblo, but that wasn’t always obvious to users of the site.

A New Logo:

The wheel of orange armless men was retired in favor of something more representative of quizzes, surveys, and communication. The little faux chart-like elements in the “Q”, which resembles a speech bubble, make for a very nice finished product.

Videos Videos Videos:

We realized that our users, which skew on the younger side, weren’t much for reading help text and as a result weren’t completely understanding some of the main functions and features of the site. Video seemed to be the perfect answer to this problem, and to that end, you will now find videos scattered around the site in some of our key areas, including right on the front page. More will be added in the coming weeks.

One Kick Ass Quiz Widget For Your Blog Or Website

Probably the coolest thing included in this re-launch, is our new flash-based quiz widget. Users previously needed to use javascript in order to embed our polls, and multi-question quizzes and surveys were just a nightmare to manage, so flash was the answer. The result is the super slick, super robust, sexy and functional flash widget below.

Within the coming days, we will add functionality that allows users to skin these with different colors to match their websites or blogs, but at least now the default color scheme doesn’t make you want to gouge your eyes out!

If you want to try out the widget on your own site or social networking profile, look for the “Post This Quiz” box on any one of our Quibblo quiz pages. For more specific instructions, there are links in the global footer of Quibblo that point you to various network-specific instructional pages.

Those are the big points so far, but I can promise you that there is a TON more to come. This is really a re-design and re-align of some of our existing features and functionality, but this new layout and setup allows for some more awesome expansion to come. Stay tuned for more updates, and be sure and let me know your thoughts and/or ideas on the site.

And a huge thanks to all of those involved in getting this done, from designers and developers, to testers and systems people, it was a huge team effort and the results are pretty awesome!