Yzabel / August 15, 2005

Here’s the second installment of my Tips on Starting a New Blog post.DesignThere aren’t many people who like to look at an ugly site, this is a fact—and it’s perhaps worth for blogs even more than for regular pages, as visitors will regularly come to check the new posts! Try to get at least a clear, readable and pleasant template here. Blog services as well as most standalone platforms will provide you with a handful of templates to choose from: Blogger does have a good twenty of them, while platforms such as WordPress can gather an even wider amount, developed freely by other users. After a while, it can be a good idea to set a test blog and learn and tweak templates a little, in order to come up with “your” own design, easily recognizable by your readers; for non-professional blogs, I however don’t consider it an absolute must-do from the start, and contents will here be more important to build a readership.For business blogs, things are a little different: better get someone to work on the design before launching the blog. Templates in this case are more important.Note: If testing new templates, do that on a test blog. At some point, your templates will contain wrong code, styles that display oddly, etc… With a test blog, your readers won’t stumble upon a broken, unreadable page.Content!Here we reach what will be the core of the blog during its life. One needs to put content in it, and preferrably good and regular content. In spite of the convenience of providing readers with a RSS feed to be warned about every new post, said readers also like to know that a blog is updated often, and that if they come every two or three days, they’ll find something new to read. Write about your passions, about school, about the book you’re writing, about the aims and upcoming products of your company, about what services you offer as a profession graphic-designer or writer, give examples, develop ideas… Whatever will be of interest, and relevant to the theme of your blog. In my opinion, quality has to be be here as often as possible. One won’t be terribly inspired every day, one won’t write “the post of the year” every week, but if you need a personal opinion here, I prefer read blog which authors post reflexions and other “longer” entries, rather than just short blubs containing three links each time with barely an added opinion about them.Another detail to keep in mind is that, when it comes to indexation by search engines, having a lot of relevant pages on your website will allow their spiders to crawl more content, and thus rank you higher and make your site easier to find. Evidently, in our particular case, climbing to a high amount of pages after a few months or even a few weeks is easy enough, due to the very nature of the blog.AdvertisingMy take on this is that, if you want to write for yourself only, then keep a personal diary at home, and don’t bother putting it on the web. Publishing a blog means that one wants to be read, even if to a short extent only. Thus, don’t hesitate to tell friends and family about it, include a link in e-mail signatures, or even, like some people do, print the URL on business cards (this is probably more important for business and entrepreneurial blogs). Ask your business partners to tell about it. Every resource here is good.After this come SEO tactics and other means to get the word out there that you have a blog and want it to be read. This probably would demand a post on its own, as there are many (Darren says it better than I anyway in his Search Engine Optimization for Blogs post). What is sure, is that if you want/need your blog to be known, this is an important point to take care of. At least make sure to submit your blog URL to Google, Yahoo, dmoz.org and perhaps a few blog directories (Blogarama, Blog Directory…), and to check little details such as meta-tags (see my Meta-tags Analyzer post). All of this combined can already give you a good start.With all this said, you should normally already have way enough on your plate to start a blog. Now it’s time to blog on—and to enjoy it, since this is after all important too.Read the second part of this articleblogging