How to (& how not to) design the looks of your professional blog

Via Darren here’s an excellent post on pre-launching your blog for success, which, not unsurprisingly is something I’ve been thinking about of late.

I’ve been tinkering with IncSub for a long lime now, trying to find a sustainable model for the free hosting for teachers stuff that we do and it’s never really worked out because the point of IncSub has always been about sharing, discussion and helping teachers engaging with technology, not operating as a professional consultant.

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Which is why it all kinda came to place after a conversation with Darren, organising Blogtalk Downunder and helping people and organisations left right and centre with blogs… I’m already a bloody blogging consultant so why aren’t I trying to make a living out of that… duh.

So here’s how I figured out the concept behind this site, the design and the strategy. It’s taken, um, less than a week, so please don’t hesitate to tell me I’m waaaay off the mark, we shall see :o)

The Looks

I liked the idea so much of having a simply browsable site that I figured that had to be in your face at the top… hence the blogging for business, education, community, a cause and money links. The idea behind this is that people coming in from search or recommendation have quick access to key posts in that area that they might find useful. That’s not to say that everything goes into these categories though (this won’t) just key stuff.

Go into those categories and you’ll find, as you do on the front page, summaries of each post. The idea here is that through putting up focused snippets with explanatory titles people will be able to browse and get a great sense of the wonderful content here and why they should subscribe :o) Also, the WP ‘more’ tag is a great way of choosing where you want the summary to go to.

Moving down the site I wanted to make it crystal clear that there are services here… hence the blogging workshops, strategy, solutions and design links are right up there and not only link to descriptions of the services but a contact form with each one so that, should it seem like something worth considering, people can get in touch with me through a click on that page.

Add to that the blatant steal (well a lot of this stuff is, ahem, adapted) from Problogger of the weekly email (I figured this was more important to highlight than the RSS feed as, if you’re an RSS-type you’re probably happy to scroll down a bit to pick that up :o) and you’ve essentially got your no-scroll front page content… pretty simple I hope.

Beneath that picture and about links are, I think, a good move as is the use of the WordPress Subscribe Me plugin which gives me all the buttons no stress!

Instead of putting a ‘recent posts’ thing at the bottom of each post I thought I’d put it in the sidebar… seems tidier but at the same time I’m not sure if I shouldn’t have it at the end of long posts (like this one) too.

A few questions that remain for me are:

-Do I need to indicate more clearly that the boxes at the top are clickable links to categories… or is that self evident?
-Do I need to push the about feature up and make it more of a sentence than a series of links? Should I even have this ‘personable’ about feature if I’m trying to be ‘professional’?
-Are these summaries the right way to go?