The Key features of a typical blog website
Key features of a blog for owners :
- Allows multiple user logins
- Easy for users to write and upload posts and edit them later if needed
- Allows users to save drafts prior to final posting – so a post doesn’t have to be completed in one go
- Easy for users to embed images and videos and provide optimised alt text
- Allows full coding rather than just plain text so that posts can have hyperlinks to other pages in the main website or to other posts, or to another website or blog, etc
- Looks and works the same in all popular browsers
- All posts mentioned in the sitemap.xml …
- SEO optimisation allowing customisation of <titles> and meta descriptions
- Can provide visitor statistics
- Customisable themes
- You can show links to other favourite blogs or websites
- Allows links to other sections in a main website – e.g. a contact us page or further information
- Customisable styles via edit of CSS files
- Users can post from anywhere in the world
- Everything is self-contained – no need for other programs like an HTML editor or an FTP client.
- Built in spell checker with live spell checking as you type.
- The ability to summarise posts with an automatically generated page which contains the whole post and a link to this page from the main blog.
- The ability to assign multiple categories to any post and be able to display archives by category.
- Allows the addition of multiple widgets and plugins for enhancement – e.g. for finding out when another blog links to yours
- Is a W3C compliant state of the art publishing platform provided by a highly supported and popular provider
- As the best blogging systems are free open source (e.g. WordPress) there should be no software purchasing costs, running costs, upgrade costs or license fee.
Key features of a blog for visitors
- Easy for visitors to navigate and find things of interest to them
- Allows comments on individual posts by visitors (user interactivity)
- Has a spam blocking system
- Shows recent posts in the sidebar
- Previous posts easy to find in the sidebar
- Posts print out just how they look on screen
- Has an RSS feed so visitors are encouraged to subscribe to all posts via email or newsfeed system
- The option to receive posts from a variety of different sources with e-mail capability such as mobile phones, PDA’s, web-based e-mail etc.
- Has a bookmarking icon so visitors are encouraged to save the site in their favourites
- Has bookmarking facility so visitors can recommend posts to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Stumpleupon, Digg, etc therefore helping with bringing new visitors
- Has a sharing facility so visitors can forward posts by email to a friend
- Has a tag cloud so visitors can see the most popular topics
- Has a word search facility
- Has categories for easy filtered searching by visitors
- Has archived posts listed by months in the sidebar
