Site Builder Part 5: Adding a Blog to Your Website
The final iteration of our Website Builder series covers how to add a blog to your website. After this guide you’ll not only know how to create a functioning blog for your website but will’ve graduated from the Site Builder school. New websites won’t stand a chance with your newfound skill and creative license.
Setting up your blog
As with your website shop and other major additions to your site, you’ll want your blog to have its own page and navigation button on your website. This’ll allow it to be accessed easily while also not causing too much clutter on any of your other pages.
This is especially important since your blog will have plenty of new content (we hope!), which can take away from what other pages are trying to convey.
So, after adding a new page via the menu item button for your blog, drag the blog element button to a spot where you’d like your blog to be displayed.
Once you’ve added the element to your page, you’ll see something that looks similar to this. Some of the images may change depending on the theme you used. The blog element will generally make use of any images that are in the image library.
So, if you’ve already sorted your imagery, it won’t take too much to change what’s displayed for each post.
Blog tab
As with any of the other elements, you can access the details of your blog element by taking a look at the blog tab on the right of your screen.
There you’ll be able to choose the layout you feel matches your aesthetic, choose what categories you want showing, and edit the background to match your website theme.
If you plan to show only certain categories, it may be worth having another page to showcase some of the blog posts that aren’t in the spotlight. Alternatively, you can also add another blog element and showcase one set of blogs in one, and another set in the second element.
Listing
Next up for the blog element tab is Listing. With this setting you can choose how many posts you want to display. If you’re pumping out blogs like nobodies’ business, you may want to increase the number of posts shown so old content doesn’t get drowned by the ever-flowing words machine.
If you’re doing about one post a week, the standard of six items per page is okay. Generally, we’d suggest at least 10 as evergreen content (which you should be writing) can be relevant regardless of how old it is.
You can also choose what details to display for each blog post, such as time, date, title, description, and anchor navigation.
Thumbnails
We all know the adage of how many words a picture is worth, at the least. The thumbnail setting gives you the option of editing the image attached to each blog post preview.
It’ll give readers a good insight as to what the blog post is about before they read any text.
Text
As the name implies, this’ll allow you to adjust the text your blog posts use. We set ours to something a little funky, but we suggest a font that’s first and foremost readable.
Aesthetics can come after the message has been conveyed, which is the entire point of blog posts.
Edit blog posts
Now that the basics are out of the way, we can take a look at how to edit your posts specifically.
Start by clicking on the blog element and you’ll see a bar popup at the top with the option to “Edit posts”. Click the button and you’ll find a window showing you your posts. You can add a new post with the “New Post” button in the top right corner.
The pen icons denote editing the individual posts, as you’re probably well aware by now. You’ll find yourself looking at the General editing window for the post you clicked on.
Here you’ll be able to change the cover image of the post, the title, the category, its status, and actually write it as well.
If you’ve visited our other Website Builder guides, you should be comfortable navigating the window to edit what you need. Even if you haven’t the prompts are easy to figure out with just a little experimenting.
Besides changing the content and image, you should also take a look at the categories for each post. Now would be a good time to sort them out so you won’t have to bother creating new ones every time you write a post.
No written content would be complete without adding a little SEO to ensure it’s relevant and highly ranked on Google. If you want to learn a bit more about page ranking, check out our blog on SEO.
Fill in the SEO Title and Description to give your post a reasonable chance out there on the internet.
After we’ve made our little edits and added some effects, our blog element looks a like this:
Conclusion
That about sums up the guide on how to create a blog for your website using the Website Builder, as well as the guide series. We’ve given you the tools and potential to create something special, now go out there and do it!
