Design Your Blog for Business
Unedited Guest Article by Carma Spence-Pothitt
A blog for business is a bit different from a personal blog, as you probably already guessed. When you plan your blog for success, you should also give some thought to what your business blog will look like.
Your blog’s layout and design plays a big role in how effective it will be. Here are a few tips to make your blog stand out from the millions of other blogs out there.
Personality
What is your brand’s personality? Is it perky? understated? creative? professional? The colors and layout you choose should help communicate the personality you want for your blog. For example, I chose vibrant colors for this blog because I felt they expressed the “turbo-charge” nature of the information, along with my quirky personality. The Women’s Business Gallery uses a more down-to-Earth color palette because it is much more “business” focused. Because I’m going with a “vamp” theme for WordPress ReVamp, I chose a sultry, simmering color combination. Get the picture?
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Your Header Banner
This is the image and text that appears on the top of every page. In the case of this blog, it is where the name of the blog appears and has the imagery and tag-line beneath it. This is where you put your logo and most of your branding imagery. It also sets the tone for the rest of the layout. When I’m customizing Wordpress themes for my clients, this is the first part of the design I work on.
Your Navigational Structure
How do you want to structure your navigation? What is the hierarchy of your pages and posts? How do you want people to move about your site? Do you want navigational links to be across the top, down one side or the other, at the bottom, or a combination of these? Do you want the home page to be unique or the same as all the other pages? What will appear on your home page: a static page or your blog posts? Before you even think about design, you need to have a good idea of how you want people to navigate your website. This information, as well as who your audience is, informs the design of the site.
Advertisements
Will you have advertising on your site? What kind? Will you be advertising your own products and services, like I do on the home page of this website? Will you advertise other peoples products through affiliate links? Will you sell advertising space? What about Google Ads? You need to know what kinds of advertising, if any, you want on your website so you can incorporate space for them into your design.
Give Your RSS Feeds Some Flare
Using FeedBurner, you can give your readers two ways to subscribe to your RSS feed: through their favorite RSS Reader or via email. Giving them this option can increase the number of RSS subscriptions you get. Also, if you use Aweber, you can create a “Blog Broadcast” and automatically send summaries of your blog posts to your subscribers.
Audio and Video
You don’t have to limit your design and content to just static images and text. You can incorporate audio and video components to liven up your site. It is better to know you are going to do this up-front, so that you can work these elements seamlessly into your design. Podcats and Vidcasts are one option, but you can also post interesting video from YouTube, as well.
A Favicon
This is the little image that appears next to the URL in the address bar. Having a unique, branded favicon makes your blog look that much more professional. There are lots of ways to add one to your website, but, at least for WordPress websites, I’ve found using the MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin to be the easiest. And, generating a favicon in the correct format is pretty easy, too. Just go to favicon.co.uk, upload the image you want to use as your favicon and follow the directions.
Carma Spence-Pothitt is the publisher of WordPress ReVamp where you can learn more about building and nurturing a thriving Web presence and sign up for your copy of “WordPress and the Solo-Entrepreneur.”
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