- Write down the details of your blog plan from the outset.
- What to consider when selecting a platform.
- Professional templates give you tech support and flexibility.
- Selling ads is a great way to monetize your blog.
Looking back on when I started Little Austinite, I wish I had planned ahead more.
I never anticipated that the site would grow as fast as it did.
At playgroup one day, I told my friends about the idea of Little Austinite and purchased the domain name that night.
I started out using a Wordpress template called Mimbo, which gave me the magazine look I wanted for the blog. For 1 month, I regularly added content to Little Austinite, and then on Mother’s Day 2009, I launched Little Austinite with Facebook and Twitter. The immediate response was surprising—100 “likes” within a day on Facebook, and not just from family and friends. I solicited advice from readers for ideas on how to improve Little Austinite and I received lots of emails with recommendations from parents. They suggested including directories and coupons. I wanted to add an events calendar as well. I also initially had an RSS feed for local Craigslist posts for children’s items. As I began to add content beyond just the blog posts, I found that Mimbo forced me to keep everything in 2 columns. And the website soon became difficult to navigate. I couldn’t even customize the menu for navigation buttons. I foresaw a problem with Mimbo and immediately decided that I needed to change templates. This was 2 months into Little Austinite. The first step in the “big change” was to back up all my data with my host server. I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose any content. To minimize disruption, I created a subdirectory in Little Austinite (example: littleaustinite.com/testsite) where I uploaded Wordpress and a new template I’d purchased. Here I created logos and banners, changed font colors, and figured out how I wanted the new template to look. Once that was to my satisfaction, I was ready to change Little Austinite. The ability to change templates easily is one of the best aspects of Wordpress. Updating your Wordpress template is a 2-step process:
- Upload the new template on the back-end and click to activate the new template.
- Delete the test site subdirectory.
When I’d figured out what I wanted to change based on the test site, I waited to update the actual site during the time (around 10pm) when I had the lowest amount of traffic. I was able to change everything during a few hours while readers slept. If I’d created an outline of everything I wanted to have on the site rat Luckily, I switched early enough in Little Austinite’s history that I had fewer than 100 posts. If this were to occur today, the change would be far more difficult. I also found a template that matched the overall look of how Little Austinite began. The layout didn’t change significantly, but the amount of content that I could display increased.
Plan Your Blog As Fully As Possible
Step 1: Sit down and write out a plan.
Sketch it all out on paper. Write in as much detail as possible about what you want the site to look like and what content you’d like to cover. Make sure you have enough content to write about.
I’m a visual person so I find drawing charts and Venn diagrams helps in brainstorming.
Questions to ask yourself while brainstorming:
- What do I like to do?
- What does my target audience like to do?
- Where do we share something in common?
These questions are a great starting point for defining a mommy blog’s point of view.
Once you’ve established the website content, draw on a piece of paper what you want the website to look like. I recommend looking at professional templates to get an idea of what’s available.
- Which ones look most appealing?
- Which templates will allow you to organize and place all of your existing ideas?
Step 2: Decide On A Platform.
By platform, I mean the way to publish content on the Internet. Blogger, Typepad, Google sites, wikispaces, Joomla, and Drupal are all examples of ways to manage and publish content on the web. Each has its own set of technical requirements, but I recommend using Wordpress for simplicity and power.
Wordpress’ back-end (control panel) where you write and manage content is intuitive. The names of different functions are easy to understand.
- To write a new post, click on “add new” under posts.
- To publish the post onto the website, click “publish” within the post.
- “Categories” lets you create just that—categories—for posts. Those can be nested with subcategories.
Wordpress distinguishes between “pages” and “posts.”
I use pages to display information like “About Us” or “Contact Us,” which doesn’t necessarily change with time.
Posts are things like news articles that change frequently and need to be organized into categories.
The great thing about Wordpress is that all the pages have their own menu, which makes it easy to create a navigation bar with buttons for pages. Posts also get their own navigation bar with categories. Wordpress has built-in organization tools like filing cabinet systems. When you do find yourself blogging for a length of time, the content isn’t a complete mess. Because Wordpress is open-source with a wide community of supporters and developers, there are limitless ways to customize the website without needing to know much about website coding. Developers create codes called “plugins” that allow you to add something “extra” to the website. I wanted to add buttons for readers to easily link to Little Austinite’s Facebook and Twitter account. I can simply use a Facebook plugin and drag and drop the plugin (now called a widget) when I’m ready to use it into my website. Wordpress makes it easy to search for plugins. When you’ve decided on a platform and design, again I would recommend Wordpress. Start looking for a template that matches the design you sketched out.
Step 3: Buy a professional template.
Templates change the look of how you want to organize your content.
- Do you want the navigation buttons (menu) on the top, left, right?
- Do you want the blog posts to show up in one column or two columns?
- Do you want a space to display a large blog logo?
Wordpress lets you search for free templates from the control panel, but free templates don’t often come with technical support. Say you choose a template, but want to move your logo image from the top left to the top right. A free template may not be able to do this, and if you don’t know how to code, this is a rather difficult task. Professional templates provide you with tech support so that you can ask the developers how to certain things. If you want to display blog ads, both templates would work just fine; however, notice that some templates have a footer section. The footer section gives you extra space for adding content that you may not need now, but will allow growth in the future. Choose a template with a footer. If you choose a free template, the footer will display unless you can change the code to remove or hide the footer. If you don’t have any content to put there, you may be forced to add content immediately.
Professional templates, on the other hand, will often offer the ability to toggle between having and not having a footer with a single click.
Often in professional templates, one template may have multiple ways to configure how you want each component to look. You can set the content to display in multiple columns or add another column for “extras” to house the plugins. In searching for templates, I found I never could find one template that was exactly what I wanted. I didn’t have the time nor budget to create a completely custom template. Pick a design that you think will best allow you to grow the website. There are many free templates that allow you to customize the look of the website, but be sure to read the fine print. Some free templates may only be for personal use, so if you plan to sell and display ads, those templates can’t be used. Professional templates usually don’t have this restriction. But in general most templates will come ready to add advertisements.
Step 4: Consider advertisements.
If you want to make money from your blog, you’ll have to take ads into consideration. Many bloggers make money by selling ads.
Make sure the template you buy has adequate space for ads so you don’t have to switch later.
What would the blog look like if you have ten advertisement images stacked one on top of another? Would it make the blog look unappealing?
Consider where all the “widget” spaces are on the template because that is the space that you can add what you would like to the website, including ads. And if there aren’t enough widget spaces, you’ll only have a limited set of options for where to place the ads.
When I first began Little Austinite, I had only a loose idea of what I wanted to do. Initially, I used a free template and filled it with as much information as I could from my personal blog. When I needed to grow the site, I had to buy a new template. And during that transition, I risked losing the information I’d already posted. I also risked losing Little Austinite readers who may have grown accustomed to searching for content in a particular manner.
Fully thinking through your idea and planning ahead will eventually save you time and worry in the long run. Consider the technical and business aspects of your blog, particularly if you want to make money.
