A lot of questions have come our way from those of you wondering whether you can create a blog on your website – perhaps a student has a particular experience to share with other students, or a professor wishes to record his or her insights and nuggets of wisdom over the World Wide Web.
Today we walk you through how to add a blog on the CMS, and some important points about blogging you need to know before you get it running. First, here is the simple part:
How to make a blog on your site
Create a Category for your blog
This can be done one of two ways… one way is to start with Posts>Categories on the menu of your CMS Dashboard. Your cursor will automatically be placed in the “Name” field, where you can type the name of your blog. Input the blog name and click Add New Category.
The second way you can create a new category is by making it in the editor for a Post (or add a new post). On the right-hand side where Categories are, you can choose to “Add New Category”, type in the blog name and hit Enter. When you add a new category this way, the new category is automatically selected for the Post you are editing.
Select your Blog Category for each blog Post
After you have created a Category for your blog, all your blog Posts must be saved under that Category.
Build a Page where your blog will be displayed
The last step is to create a new Page for your blog. The Page will contain a News Feed (click “List News“, the icon that looks like a newspaper, to select categories) that only includes the Blog category.
It’s that simple!
Before you start the blog
Before you create a blog, here is a bit of blog advice from the Web Team:
Blogging is harder than you might expect.
Creating a blog entails a commitment to produce content on a regular basis. Expecting yourself or another blogger to remember to write or have the time to write over each passing week and month is often too optimistic as mid-term rush and the obligations of life take priority. However, we have provided some tips below to help you avoid a fizzled-out blog feed!
Plan ahead
A very effective strategy is to create from the outset a weekly blog plan for the semester or year. Write drafts of your content and create (or require whomever is blogging to create) several weeks’ or a few months’ worth of blog posts before the launch of the Blog. You can always write more spontaneous Posts as the occasion arises.
Schedule Posts
Make use of CMS’ “Schedule” feature that allows you to queue posts. Since you will already have a repertoire of Posts before the blog even begins, you can input your content into CMS and queue up your blog posts ahead of time. Then you can sit back, knowing your blog will publish itself! Learn how to Schedule Posts here.
Don’t want to plan?
If it does not seem realistic to put in this much planning at the beginning of the blog venture, it is probably also not realistic to expect that without setting such a standard there will be a steady flow of content for your blog. If this is the case, it may make more sense to write two or three news posts to your general News Feed, featuring the content you originally wanted in a blog.
Good luck and happy writing!