How to create a blog website

Today thousands of websites available in the Internet are made in the blog format. Since 1997, when Jorn Barger coined the term weblog (with time it shortened to blog ), this type of website became extremely popular.

Let's find out the main reasons for this.

1. Blogs are great for communication. It's all about interactivity here. Comments are an integral part of any blog, so you can get to know what people think about your ideas, products, experience etc.

2.Blogs enable everyone to publish their thoughts on the web. There are lots of easy-to-use blog applications available, so you don't have to be a professional web developer to get presented in the Internet. Any individual or company has an opportunity to address hundreds of thousands of people every day.

3.Blogs help build trust. Any business is striving for winning customers' confidence and increasing credibility. Blog is a most relational medium, so it's indispensable in building trust with the audience.

4.Blogs are well indexed by search engines. Frequent updates and focus on a certain topic are among the distinctive blog features – search engines value this most of all.

5.Blogs build reputation. Again, blog format is designed the best way to show expertise and win the audience of the field you are working in.

In order to provide our customers with all the tools needed to make their websites successful, site2you added “blogability” to our site building system. Blog as an additional content source is a great way of drawing traffic to your website and converting visitors into sales.

See how to create a blog within site2you website builder below. It will take you a few simple steps.

1. Let's create a seprate page which will contain our blog. Log in to the admin area of your website. Go to the “Edit Page Layout” tab and press “Add new page” button. In the opened window choose necessary layout of your blog page and name it. 

Next step is page meta information set up. It enables search engines to index your blog page. Great SEO friendly feature. 

After you added meta tags to the blog page, create a menu item for it. You can item's position simply by dragging it up or down the menu list. 

Finally we've got a new page Blog with its own menu item 

2. Now to give our blog its specific features like comments and data we need to add site2you in-built “Blog” infobox. Click on the “Add content box” button in the “Edit page layout” tab, go down to Miscellaneous and select Blog in the drop-down. Hold left mouse button on it and drag infobox to the main section of the page. 

In the next opened window you may set blog preferences listed in the picture below. 

By clicking “Add a new element” in the window above, you can create the first post in your blog. For maximum convenience in your blog management, we provide Post Preview option which allows you to write unique summary for the post. The preview text will be displayed on the main blog page. The rest of the entry can be read by clicking on the post title.

3. Now our first blog post is displayed on the page. You can easy edit it, or add a new entry by going to the “Edit Content” tab and choosing element management buttons right in the post area.

4. The initial page layout we chose in the very beginning provides additional text box on the right side of the content section. One of the great options of our website builder is layout flexibility. You may simply add or remove content boxes to make the page look the way you need. In this example, we will the “Blog Right Column” into the sidebar of our blog. Just press “Edit highlighted content” in the current info box area and type necessary information. In our case it is Blogroll. 

To add another element to the info box, click on “Add a new element” button and add text the way described above. Then choose the “Edit Page Layout” tab and press “Element list” button highlighted in red in the picture below.

Here is what we've got.

As you see, it's quite easy to enrich your website with the blog. Our website maker enables to change classic website to blog. This will take a bit more effort, as you will have to remove almost all pages which are useless for the blog format. In one of our next articles we will cover some more aspects of changing a website into blog.

But remember that the bare fact that you have blog doesn't guarantee immediate success. Like any other sort of website, blog requires much work and attention. However, in this post we mentioned many attractive aspects of blogging which should be certainly taken into consideration.