At a time when companies and individuals are incorporating blogs into their marketing strategies and lives, a unique blog design will set your blog apart from others. Don't settle for an "out of the box" design — or features.

What is a Blog?

A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting), which are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging, one which consists of blogs with very short posts. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs. With the advent of video blogging, the word blog has taken on an even looser meaning — that of any bit of media wherein the subject expresses his opinion or simply talks about something. (content provided by Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)

Blog Audiences

Truth be told, there already exists a wide blog-reading audience for blogs, and "bloggers" tend to talk and share. And, because blogs can have a "syndication" feature, they can be picked up by news aggregator services -- that is, your audience may find your blog through Yahoo, bloglines.com and other highly trafficked websites. In fact, your audience may read your blog daily without ever visiting it in person!

About those search engines ... search engines tend to visit blogs much faster, and with more frequency, than regular websites. We've observed Google -- and blog news aggregators -- visiting blogs within hours of installing the software. This means that your "posts" will be included in news sites that feature blog output as well as in the major search engines.

Business use for Blogs

While blogs can be used for any topic, businesses are utilizing blogs with increasing frequency as a method of publishing an ongoing series of articles, industry observations, tips and news on their own, as and when they will. Some are quite popular and enjoy large followings. Blogs can also be set up to allow others to post and to comment about posts, thereby gaining valuable interactivity and user input.

Blog Structure

One of the appealing features of blog is their structure — where the latest posts are featured on the home page, and are moved off after a period of time that you specify. The basic structure of a well-structured blog is:

• Home page - current posts (articles) which rotate off the home page as new posts are published
• Permanent page for each individual post, plus visitor comments. The permanent page is created when you publish the post, even while the post is displayed on the home page.
• Category page - index of posts in that category
• Monthly page - index of posts for that month
• Search Feature - for searching the blog

We emphasize "well structured" because many blogs lack basic features that would make them more usable — and some which cause problems with search engines. We customize our clients' blogs to make them both more usable and to ensure they don't incur these search engine problems.

Blog Design

Like any website we design, your blog package will include a unique logo and page design that will accomplish the following for you:

• Look professional and represent you or your company well
• Be designed to help people to remember you or your company
• Be targeted to your audience and/or customers
• Be unconfusing and easy to get around
• Built to download fast and structured for easy future growth
• Increases your exposure on the Web by inclusion in news aggregators and search engines

While different types of blog software are available, some with their own web hosting and monthly fees, we prefer to recommend a stand-alone blog program that we install on your own web hosting space. This ensures that, if the blog-hosting company changes something, goes out of business, or raises its prices, your blog will not be affected.

*Literature provided by:  DianeV Web Studio

We encourage anyone interested in our services to contact us for a free consultation to learn more about what we can do for you. Be sure to check out our extensive portfolio of results we've delivered in the past.