Thursday, February 24, 2011

Updating Your Web Presence – Part 1

It is a good idea to do a periodic review all of the places you have created for your business on the web. New features may have been added to sites you are on, information you have posted may need updating to stay current or you may need to prune out a site from your web presence that isn’t working for you. Two recent examples of this that I have been involved with made me think that sharing them with my readers might provide them (you) with a helpful reminder.

It has been about a year now since Blogger added the ability to add static pages to the blogs it hosts. I remember finding out about this fairly early on but didn’t get a chance to check it out for a while. When I did, I found that it was a pretty easy thing to do. (I suspect that it is even easier to do for a brand new blog than retrofitting an old, modified template like I am using.) Just click on the posting tab on the blogger design page for your blog, click on the edit pages button on the line below the tabs and follow the prompts. You can create up to 10 stand-alone pages this way. I knew intuitively that I wanted to do this and that it should make it easier for people to connect with my information that would be useful to them, but it took a while for me to figure out exactly how I wanted to use this great new feature.

My mental block finally dissolved and currently my blog is a work in progress. I have fleshed out the “bones” by creating my static pages and picked the option to have them show up as horizontal buttons placed under my header. I then placed a bit of content on each page. Some of this content came out of my side bar so that it is not as cluttered. As I have time, I will be adding content (text, links and visuals) to my tabs with an eye towards cohesiveness, ease of navigation and SEO. Feel free to check back and follow my progress. Perhaps it will give you inspiration for your own blog’s facelift.

What fueled my inspiration to be able to dissolve my mental block? I think it is due in large part to a website review that I just completed for someone that was changing his direction but seemed to be suffering from his own mental block on how best to proceed. (Isn’t it always easier to see what someone else needs to do than to fix your own things?) I’ll do a review of that project next month as this post is getting lengthy.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for posting this. I too have added one page to my Blogger, and have plans to add at least one other when I get all the stuff together.

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  2. That is great Jill. I decided to put tabs out there for all of the pages that I wanted with a bit of info and I am fleshing them out as I get a chance. They are not very flashy now but are a work in progress that at least has some basic info on them at this point.

    There are definitely pros and cons for both approaches.

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