I was walking with a friend yesterday and discussing the look of blogs. I was explaining that we are building lots of Word Press blogs for our small business clients these days because active blogs are excellent for building traffic and the blog has built-in, easy-to-use editing tools for updating the website. However, these sites look similar to other sites we build–they do not look like blogs.
If you are reading this you are probably familiar with what makes blogs look bloggy. Blogs all tend to have the same lay out and fonts. This page is a blog and it has the look most blogs have…title and text and then lists of links down the side.
However, when you build a WordPress blog site you or most likely your web designer can give the homepage most any look you desire. What happens in a WordPress or other blogging platform sites, is that you create some static pages and a unique design that can be applied to those static pages. You’ll probably also want a blog that you update frequently. That “blog” page is where you put the blog posts and it looks like a blog. Below I’ve attached examples of sites we’ve built recently.
The one suggestion I have if you choose to customize the whole blog page is to not customize the navigation. If you don’t customize the navigation, you can add a page to your main navigation at any time. If you do customize your navigation you’ll need to go to your web designer to add, delete or rename a page. Not a huge deal, but it is more convenient not to customize the navigation bar.