Welcome to the New CorporateInklings!
Welcome to the new CorporateInklings blog! Of course, you’ll first notice that it looks a lot different around here. But the changes run deeper than looks – with several new functionalities designed to make digesting the blog an easier experience for you, our readers.
Are you looking to build a better blog, too? All these changes may inspire a new look or feel for your next blog refresh.
Featured Posts
It makes sense for blogs to be chronological. But sometimes, it’s also useful to keep an older post front-and-center, especially if it’s promoting content that may have a longer shelf life (and may be more popular with the audience). As a result, we’ve rolled out a ‘featured posts scroller’ on the top of the page, to highlight certain high-interest entries. This was pretty straightforward, and should be part of every new blog because it helps drive registrations for new, interesting and valuable content on your site.
Easy-to-use Social Links
Links to your social networks, as well as share buttons, are undoubtedly important for spreading content. We previously had “Share it” buttons, but readers are more accustomed to immediately visible buttons that sit right next to stories. The goal is to make readers go through less hoops (or clicks), and become more likely to share.
Consolidated Categories
We had upwards of 20 categories at one point, and we decided it would be best to consolidate them so that readers could more easily browse for similar content. We narrowed these down into six areas of expertise (while our former, more niche topics can still be used in our ‘tags,’ seen below every post). Not only does this create easier navigation, but using tags and categories is great for SEO.
Optimized Search and Navigation
When we started the blog, this probably wasn’t as important. Now that we’ve accumulated hundreds of posts, this became absolutely necessary to create easier options for us and our readers to find specific posts or topics.
People find content in different ways. A search bar is great for navigation, but so are organized archives. Our archive options are the last 10 posts, monthly and categories.
What do you think of the changes? What other kinds of changes or additions have you made to your blog in order to create easier navigation, increase visibility to important content, or somehow other improvements? We’d love to hear from you on this, in the comments.
By: Robert Klucevsek
Twitter: @RobertKlucevsek
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#2 written by Robert Klucevsek 4 months agoWe’re with you – what WordPress tends to do a good job with is making sure its plug ins only improve the visitor experience, rather than make things more convoluted. In some ways, it’s somewhat similar to how Facebook allows a small degree of customization (displaying apps), but generally, user profiles have an identical look, to ensure an easy, clean navigation on every page – and to avoid it turning into the glittery, illegible wasteland that helped destroy MySpace when users went wild with unnecessary plug ins. WordPress can, of course, be completely customized, but by offering clean, navigation-improving plug ins, it’s encouraging and supporting a better visitor experience on all its blogs.
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Just moving to WordPress was great for my company due to all the plugins. For example, the “related posts” plug in is also great for providing readers with easy navigation to other content they may find useful.