Here at Zenman, we do a lot of custom blog development using our CMS of choice, WordPress. While you could get started with a simple WordPress template that has a built-in blog, chances are it will be missing features you’d really benefit from, and will include many features that you will not. All features have pros and cons that make them extremely useful for some websites, but annoying or confusing for others. Zenman can help you choose which features will give you the most out of your blog.
We offer two levels of blogs that can be added to any custom WordPress site we build: a simple blog, or a complex blog.
Simple Blog
A simple blog is appropriate if you’d like a blog for rudimentary SEO and recurring content needs, but it’s not a major focus of your site or you’ll likely post infrequently. Below are the options that are available for a simple blog.
Organization
Rather than simply displaying a chronological list of all posts you’ve ever posted, it’s helpful to group related material so users can explore posts that match their interests.
WordPress provides two levels of organization. Categories allow you to group posts based on broad topics — think News, Awards, Tutorials, etc. — and generally a post will only fit into one category. Tags allow you to define post relationships across categories; for instance, a tag called Photography could apply to a post about new camera news, an award received for a photo shoot, and an article explaining how to get the perfect lighting for a shoot. A post will often have several tags.
For blogs where history is important, a simple blog can organize posts by year, too. An archive makes sense in some cases, but for many blogs this isn’t very useful since users will be more interested in finding, say, photography tutorials than they are in seeing every post about anything from 1999.
Navigation
Blog navigation is most commonly facilitated through a sidebar (which also allows the content column to be a little narrower and thus easier to read). In the sidebar, you can list categories, tags, and archives, depending on the decisions above you made for the organization of your blog.
With a simple blogroll, you can also break a list of many posts into separate pages (so, for example, you could show 5 or 10 post titles per page), and can have a “Newer Posts” and “Older Posts” navigation bar that lets users navigate backwards and forwards through your posts chronologically. For very small, well maintained blogs it may make sense to keep everything on one page, but pagination is best in most cases.
Post Meta Data
You may want to display some information about the posts, and this information can appear on the blogroll (the list of post titles users can click on) and the single posts themselves (the page where users actually read an individual article). This meta data generally appears in the header and/or footer of each post.
If you’d like to highlight the relationships between your posts, the meta data can list the tags associated with each post. This can encourage users to explore related posts on similar subjects within your blog, but if you have a lot of tags, it can look crowded (especially on a blogroll).
For well maintained blogs or blogs where dating the information is important, you can also add posted-on dates to each post. However, in many cases it’s preferable to have “timeless” or “evergreen” content so users aren’t put off by the age of posts; for instance, if you blog mostly about helpful photography tips, most of those tips will probably be relevant for many years to come. If you plan to post infrequently it can also be helpful to leave off the post date so as not to call attention to this fact.
Hero Graphic
If it matches the rest of the design, you can also add a single hero graphic (a tall, full-width image at the top of a page to add interest) that will be consistently displayed across all your blog pages. This can add visual interest to the page if you have an interesting image that draws users in; however, it can also push the content farther down, forcing users to scroll past the same image over and over again as they visit each new article. Therefore, the appropriateness of a hero graphic on a blog is dependent on what’s most important for your blog: drawing users in or immediately focusing their attention on the content.
Complex Blog
Our complex blog offering can include any features you’d like from the simple blog above, plus some additional features and enhancements. Unless a blog is just a minor part of your online strategy, we’ve found that a complex blog is most often the best choice. Read Tyler’s blog about the importance of blogging for businesses to learn more about the value a blog can provide.
Social Sharing
On a complex blog, you will likely have social sharing buttons. Most commonly we offer Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and/or LinkedIn sharing, but we can add other common social sharing functionality as well (Pinterest and Instagram are common options for image-rich websites, for instance).
Social sharing can really step up your website traffic and customer engagement game. It’s possible to add social sharing to the blogroll lists of posts, but it usually makes most sense to add only on the individual posts themselves so your users can read through an article and then share if they enjoyed it.
Discussion
You can also include commenting functionality with a complex blog, further increasing customer engagement. There are a couple of options for commenting: Zenman can develop commenting using WordPress’s built-in commenting functionality, or install and configure the Disqus plugin for WordPress.
The advantage of WordPress’s built-in commenting functionality is customization. Since Zenman is building it from scratch, we can apply styling to the comments that flows well with your site’s design.
Being a 3rd party pluign, Disqus is less customizable and requires you to create a separate Disqus account to moderate your comments. However, Disqus is a company focused solely on comment functionality, and therefore offers robust options for filtering, moderating, and maintaining your comments.
Keep in mind that either option will require ongoing maintenance on your part to approve comments, delete spam, and moderate any material that may be objectionable. In light of this, few of Zenman’s clients ultimately choose to employ commenting. Zenman can install anti-spam plugins like Akismet, which can help you with with spam filtering for a monthly fee. Commenting may be unnecessary on many sites, but if the increased engagement is worth your time spent in maintenance, one of the two options above will server you well.
Featured Graphics
Unlike the simple blog’s single hero graphic option, a complex blog has much more flexibility. You can have individual hero graphics for each category if you’d like. You can also have individual hero graphics for each post that you can relate to the actual post content, and pull those images into your blogroll to add visual appeal.
This does require a little more work to post to your blog since you need to choose and upload a new image every time you post, but the visual impact of the images you choose can draw users in more effectively than a simple list of post titles in your blogroll. This option is best for websites where the imagery can attract users to read, and not as effective for less visual topics (think philosophy or accounting) where stock photos may not communicate your message very well.
Authors
If you have well-known or interesting individuals posting to your blog, you can feature individual authors prominently. Each author can have their own page listing their biography, photo, and other information with a list of posts they’ve authored. Adding author images to individual posts can add a personal touch to the content. The blogroll and post pages can provide a link to the post’s author so users can find more of their writings.
Featuring authors in this way isn’t appropriate for all websites, however. Corporate entities would often prefer the posts appear to come from the organization itself rather than an obscure individual within the organization. Also, by not calling out a specific author, a blog can seem like more of a team effort rather than the thoughts of one specific person. If, on the other hand, the individual authors who are writing posts add credibility or interest to the content, then featuring post authors can enhance your blog.
Advanced Navigation
Rather than the straightforward “older/newer” button navigation available to simple blogs, complex blogs can display numbered pagination that provides much greater navigational flexibility to users. This allows users to jump to a specific page of your blogroll. More importantly, it provides a better sense of the scale of your blog and the number of posts you’ve produced across your entire blog, and also within categories, tags, and archives as appropriate.
In the sidebar, you can also have recent and/or related posts displayed. This helps keep users engaged by highlighting the content they may be interested in.
Extras
There are a few other enhancements available for complex blogs. The built-in WordPress archives simply show posts across every category, but with a complex blog you can list out archives by individual categories. This can be helpful with distinct categories like Blog and In the News, where users may be interested in seeing where you’ve recently been featured in the news compared to where you were featured a few years ago.
You can also include custom “sticky post” functionality. Generally, we avoid the built-in functionality WordPress provides for this as we’ve found it pretty hard to use. But by building our own sticky post functionality, we can empower you to feature specific posts on your Home Page or elsewhere, or to highlight a specific post at the top of your blogroll in a prominent way. For many websites sticky posts aren’t very useful, but there are certainly special situations where a sticky post can greatly enhance your site.
Get Started
Interested in a blog, but not sure where to start? Contact Zenman today. We’re experts not only at developing highly functional blogs, but also working with you to determine which features will best convey your message to the world.
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