Blog Design

Blogs, once the province of technical folk only, are now more mainstream than ever. Having a blog on your website enables you to communicate to your customers and website visitors in a timely fashion — and whenever you like.
At a time when companies and individuals are incorporating blogs into their marketing strategies and lives, a unique blog design will set your blog apart from others. Don't settle for an "out of the box" design — or features.

What is a blog?

A blog is the answer to this question: ever wanted to publish your own articles, observations or anything else on the Web without having to learn web design or how to manage a website? A blog may be your answer.
A blog is a type of website that allows you to publish (or "post") via a browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape. The word blog is a contraction of web and log ... a journal on the Web.
You'll enjoy the ease with which you can publish articles, opinions and any other data on the Web without fooling around with writing HTML or building and uploading pages. And you can include pictures as well.

Blog Audiences

Truth be told, there already exists a wide blog-reading audience for blogs, and "bloggers" tend to talk and share. And, because blogs can have a "syndication" feature, they can be picked up by news aggregator services -- that is, your audience may find your blog through Yahoo, bloglines.com and other highly trafficked websites. In fact, your audience may read your blog daily without ever visiting it in person!
About those search engines ... search engines tend to visit blogs much faster, and with more frequency, than regular websites. We've observed Google -- and blog news aggregators -- visiting blogs within hours of installing the software. This means that your "posts" will be included in news sites that feature blog output as well as in the major search engines.

Business Uses for Blogs

While blogs can be used for any topic, businesses are utilizing blogs with increasing frequency as a method of publishing an ongoing series of articles, industry observations, tips and news on their own, as and when they will. Some are quite popular and enjoy large followings. Blogs can also be set up to allow others to post and to comment about posts, thereby gaining valuable interactivity and user input.

Blog structure

One of the appealing features of blog is their structure — where the latest posts are featured on the home page, and are moved off after a period of time that you specify. The basic structure of a well-structured blog is:

• Home page - current posts (articles) which rotate off the home page as new posts are published
• Permanent page for each individual post, plus visitor comments. The permanent page is created when you publish the post, even while the post is displayed on the home page.
• Category page - index of posts in that category
• Monthly page - index of posts for that month
• Search Feature - for searching the blog

We emphasize "well structured" because many blogs lack basic features that would make them more usable — and some which cause problems with search engines. We customize our clients' blogs to make them both more usable and to ensure they don't incur these search engine problems.

Blog Design

Like any website we design, your blog package will include a unique logo and page design that will accomplish the following for you:

• look professional and represent you or your company well
• be designed to help people to remember you or your company
• be targeted to your audience and/or customers
• be unconfusing and easy to get around
• built to download fast and structured for easy future growth
• increases your exposure on the Web by inclusion in news aggregators and search engines

While different types of blog software are available, some with their own web hosting and monthly fees, we prefer to recommend a stand-alone blog program that we install on your own web hosting space. This ensures that, if the blog-hosting company changes something, goes out of business, or raises its prices, your blog won't be affected.

Cost of blog design

The blog software we recommend is Open Source (that is, it's free, though donations to the developers are appreciated) as well as stable, reliable and easy to use. Most blog software has a very generic "look" when installed, and differentiation of your blog will require design and implementation. However, since the design of your blog may not involve the kind of in-depth marketing research and development required for a regular commercial website, we've allowed our fees to reflect that fact.