2. Below is a screen shot of this blog. Apart
from the background there are four
significant sections to all blogs: the
header, the content area and the footer are
found on all blogs and are described in this
article. The fourth section, the sidebar, with
its widgets, is very useful to improve site
navigation and add enhancements to the
blog will be described in a later article.
4. Headers usually consist of an image, the name of the blog, (in this case Blog Basics .com), a
tag line, (Giving a quick slogan to the site – in this case – Welcome to the world of blogs).
Usually it will also have a site logo, but as I really like the eyes through the slit image I have
decided to use the image as the site’s logo for now.
On many sites the blog’s name and tag line are displayed as text, usually stylised, rather
than as an image. This very marginally speeds up the access to the blog and again very
marginally helps the search engines.
In addition there is usually one or two navigation menus. In this case I’ve got two: one, the
grey one, for the business side of the blog – about, contact and as the blog expands I will
have a section for contributors, a media pack, (for selling advertising), terms and
conditions, and a privacy statement, (which is often required by advertisers).
The second menu, the red one, allows access to the content. It will be expanded as the
number posts expand to include links to different stages of blogging – from starting to
becoming a professional, or possibly even a star blogger.
Trouble is I plan to have two other methods of helping visitors access the content:
through activities, such as writing, handling images, technologies, promoting a website;
and through writing posts for different types of users: personal bloggers, business
users, freelancers, those campaigning or supporting people and of course those wanting to
make money from a blog.
I still need to plan the navigation for these pathways, which will probably placing code in the
sidebar, which I will describe below.
6. This is the section where the content is displayed. In
older blogging systems full blog posts, mostly text
based, were displayed in reverse, chronological
order.
Then posts could be summarised, as in the
diagram, which is now the most common
format. The technology now allows designers to
produce very clever layouts and so for example I can
show extracts in a wider variety of ways, such as
different image sizes, different amounts of text and
even two columns in the main content area.
8. As I only set up this theme yesterday you can probably
see that I have not made any changes to the standard
footer supplied by the theme. Usually a footer displays
copyright, some basic information about the site and
ownership.
However, some footers can be very elaborate. This
encourages his visitors to carry on clicking to view content
in other sections of the site.
For more information about the components of a blog, be
sure to check out my article on sidebars and widgets.
Finally, if you’re ready to start your own blog, be sure to
check out this blog training course called “How to Start a
Blog That Matters“.
