This is Day 14 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project 60+ of us bloggers are doing together in an effort to help each other become better bloggers.
Today’s lesson and assignment is pretty straight forward – update a key page on your blog. After you’ve been blogging for a while, you tend to focus day in and day out on new posts and new comments. It’s easy to end up neglecting the static pages on your blog for months or even years.
If you haven’t already done so, go ahead and read all of your static pages. Static pages are the pages that don’t change, pages that are not blog posts or automatically generated category/tag/archive pages.
Typical pages include:
- Homepage
- About
- Contact
I was surprised that revising the homepage was included in today’s assignment. I would consider redesigning the header/logo one day’s assignment all by itself. I would also consider revising the sidebar(s) a big enough assignment to get its own day as well. But it’s in there, so give it some thought.
Adding Pages
If your blog is new, perhaps you don’t have an about or contact page. This would be a great time to add them. Other pages you may want to write include:
- Advertising info – If you have ads on your site, provide information about rates and how a person should proceed if they’d like to purchase advertising on your blog.
- Guest blogging info – If you’d like guest bloggers to write posts, it’s a good idea to add a page with guidelines and instructions.
- Topical pages – If you’ve done a popular series, consider creating a special page with links to all the posts in that series. Or if there is a topic you write about that is particularly popular, consider creating a special page with links to your best posts on that topic. For example, we have a Church Website Tips page here on Christian Web Trends (which needs to be updated, by the way).
Discussion
- What page(s) did you update or add? What changes did you make and why?
- Did you make any changes to the header or sidebar? If not, do you intend to later?
The Extra Mile
A few other things you can do to take your blog, other bloggers, and this project even further today…
- Reply & give other bloggers feedback on the little things they do.
- When other bloggers include a link to a new article they’ve posted today, click, read, and comment on it.
- Check previous posts in the series for new comments.
- Tweet, share, & bookmark this post.
- Please review Wendy Spoon’s blog, and give her some feedback.
I know I posted an answer to this yesterday but it seems to have disappeared.
I keep my info updated on a regular basis and I really like the look of my blog so I don't really need to make any changes.
I do however really like the idea of adding a guest blogging page with guidelines and instructions. I want my readers to submit theri own storeis and poems and they don't This may be a way of getting them to do so.
It's on my to do list.
I had to do today's lesson late due to personal problems. I have just revisited my static pages after going through this lesson. Surprisingly I noticed things that required attention but not observed before now. I have done a good work to them, thanks to ourchurch.com
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