Читать книгу The Small Business Guide to Online Marketing - Lola Bailey - Страница 23

I highly recommend content management systems for blogging. Simply put, a content management system (or CM system) is a system that allows you to independently manage the content of your website, without needing to know any complicated programming language. CM systems allow you not only to manage the content of your website, they will also provide you with the ability to approve and validate the content on your site before it goes live on the web. CM systems can also control the time a content element goes live, the day and time it is removed from the site and the locations on the site where the content element appears. Web pages are generated from templates. This allows your content writers to concentrate on what they do best – writing. Then, when they, or you, are ready to publish items to the website, the content will display the standardised branding of your site.

A good example of a content management system is WordPress. CM systems have outstanding capability (if using WordPress I suggest you go for the self-hosted version, which you can download at wordpress.org) – enabling you to service your marketing needs effectively and in a timely manner. Below is a snapshot of Ihubbusiness' homepage, a blog which was created in WordPress (www.ihubbusiness.co.uk).

Your blog home page is your welcome page for your blog. Here are two key considerations for your home page:

What image do you want your blog to portray? Fun? Elegant? Serious? Think about how you want your brand to be thought of, and dig deeper to find out how you want your blog to look. Consider which fonts, images, etc. will work best with your chosen outcome.

Which elements do you feel are important, in order for your readers to feel comfortable about your blog? For example, blogs are generally expected to include the following information:

 Posts

 An ‘About’ section – this is sometimes at the footer of a blog

 A contact page

 Categories – these are the logical groupings of your posts. Categories are the means of sorting your blog posts into topics, to make it easier for visitors to search your blog.

 A blogroll – this is basically a list of links that appears in your sidebar. You can link to any site found on the internet in your blogroll; however, best practice is to link to those sites which are directly related to the content of your blog. Remember that you are in effect recommending those sites to your readers as sources of related, reliable information, so choose carefully!

 Subscription options

 Logo.

Your logo can also serve as your ‘avatar’, or picture, when you post comments on other blogs or forums. You can also use it on marketing items, such as business cards.

As your blog grows in age you can add other elements, such as archives, recent posts and much more.