Starting a Blog – Reviews, Tutorials and More

Starting a blog just got easier! Learn the basics of blogging from what to do before you begin to creating your blog, developing your blog and the rules of the blogosphere.

Ready to start a University of Richmond blog?  Click here to request a blog!

How to Develop a Multi-User Course Blog

 

A multi-user course blog is a blog written by a team of student contributors. That means multiple students contribute to a single course blog content by writing posts. This type of blog can be very successful for course blogs. However, you can’t just set a group of individuals loose and expect your course blog to be successful. It takes planning, organization, and ongoing management to create a great multi-user blog. Follow the tips below to develop a course blog that has a chance for success.

1. Communicate the Goals and Focus of the Course Blog

Don’t expect student blog contributors to know what your goals are for the blog. You need to explain what you want to get from the blog and give them a specific topic to focus on in their writing. Otherwise, your team blog will be a mashup of inconsistent and possibly inappropriate content that doesn’t relate to your objectives. Identity your blog’s course objective and educate your students about it, so they understand it, accomplish your learning objective, and succeed at the assignment.

2. Develop a Course Blog Style Guide and Author Guidelines

It’s essential that you create a sense of consistency in your course blog, and that comes through the writing style, voice, and formatting used in the blog posts written by student contributors. Therefore, you may need to develop a style guide and author guidelines that cover the way students should write, grammar requirements, formatting requirements, linking requirements, and so on. The style guide and author guidelines should also address the things contributors should not do. For example, if there are specific resources you don’t want them to mention or link to, identify those names and sites in your guidelines.

3. Assign a Student Blog Editor

You may decide you need a student blog editor who has experience managing online content for your course blog to be the best that it can be. This student will review posts for style, voice, functioning links, appropriate images, and so on.

4. Create an Blog Contribution Calendar

Course blogs are better when the content is organized, focused, and consistent. Therefore, a clear contribution calendar helps to keep all student bloggers on track and ensure the blog content is interesting, useful, and not confusing to readers. Contribution calendars also help to make sure content is published at a time that is consistent with your course readings, assignments, exams, grading schedule, etc. It’s generally not a good idea to publish 10 posts at the same time as this can cause some posts to never appear on the main posts page of your course blog, minimizing that post’s potential audience.

7. Provide Feedback to Students

Communicate directly with students through email, Blackboard, in class, or during office hoursto provide feedback, praise, direction, and suggestions. If your student contributors don’t feel like they’re an important component of the blog and don’t feel like they’re given the information they need to be successful, then you’ll limit the potential success of your course blog, too.

 

Before You Start a Blog

Before you join the blogosphere, take a look at these articles to make sure you’re ready.

8 Essential Blog Design Elements

Most popular blogs have a number of blog design elements in common. Read on to learn about eight of the most important blog design elements your blog must have in order to have a chance at success!

1. Readable Text

Your blog design must be easy to read. That means the fonts you choose should be large enough to be read on high resolution monitors, and they should be simple enough to be legible. In other words, don’t choose a highly stylized font. Stick with a Web-friendly font. Also, make sure the text on your blog is easy to scan quickly.

2. Inviting Colors

Don’t select colors in your blog design that are blinding or so light that it’s difficult for visitors to read the text or even look at your blog for more than a few seconds. The easiest colors for people to read online are light backgrounds (white is best) with dark text and images (such as black, dark blue, dark green, and so on).

3. Easy Navigation

Make it easy for visitors to find your content. Don’t hinder their visit by using irrelevant hyperlinks. In other words, don’t give them a chance to click away from your blog when they land on it.

4. Short Pages

People don’t like to scroll. Keep your blog pages short by configuring your blog settings to show no more than 10 blog posts on each page of your blog (5-7 is best). If your blog posts are long, consider using the HTML more tag to split your post into two parts so only the first part appears on the main page of your blog and the rest is available for viewing when a visitor clicks the provided link (often called a ‘jump’).

5. Search Function

Make it easy for visitors to find related content, specific content, and archived content on your blog by including a search box in your blog’s sidebar or header.

6. Your Bio or Profile

While there are some successful blogs written by anonymous authors, most are written by a person or team who makes it very clear why they are the person or group to write about their blog subjects. Show the world who you are and why you’re qualified to write your blog by including a comprehensive biography. The best bloggers build strong relationships with their readers, and your bio is the first place to make yourself seem human and personable.

7. Comments and Social Links

The best bloggers build relationships with their readers, and part of that is making it easy for your readers to connect with you, share information, and get to know you. Make it easy for them to communicate with you by commenting on your blog posts. Furthermore, try using the “ShareThis” plugin to allow your readers to share your blog with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+.

8. Useful Footer

Don’t forget your footer when you create your blog. When people can’t find what they’re looking for on a Web site, they often scroll to the footer to find site-wide links such as a contact link, site map link, and so on. Take some time to include useful links and information in your blog’s footer, and make sure the footer appears at the bottom of all of your blog pages.

Creating a Blog

During the registration process for your new UR blog, you’ll need to choose a domain name and blog title. You also might want to take a few minutes before you actually start blogging to customize some of the other preferences for your blog such as the blog’s theme, active widgets, author name, comment moderation process, and so on.  Be sure to view the Blogging Tutorials section for help with all of these (and many more) options.

Once your ready to request your blog, visit the “Request a UR Blog” page.

Blogging Tutorials