Your small business blog’s organization and design
Posted by Rebecca Blackwell on Sep 29, 2008
Attention small business owners! Here are two great reads when considering your blog’s design and organization:
“One of the biggest challenges of Web design is making sure that a new customer immediately grasps that she’s in the right place. You offer what she’s looking for. You solve problems she has. Your customers look like her. And all of this is instantly communicated by your graphics. Which probably means your site looks more like Google and less like MSN, because only robots can assimilate that much information at a glance and glean anything useful from it.” Keep reading… (YML ProStaffer Sonia Simone, of Remarkable communication)
In The Elements of Business Writing, Gary Blake and Robert Bly cover principles of organizational order:
- Location: Use geography to create an order. For example, in a post on a travel blog, begin with where a country is on the globe, then cover the country’s geography, then focus on major cities, and finally, focus on one city.
- Alphabetically: Great way to do a list without appearing to give preference to any single item.
- Chronologically: When telling a story, tell the events in chronological order. Never assume your readers know times and dates, always tell them.
- Problem/Solution: This is a basis for much sales-oriented writing, and with good reason. It’s highly logical and effective.
- Inverted Pyramid: Journalistic style where the lead sentence explains all pertinent points. Each sentence after explains more and more detail about these points. Who, what, when, where, and how are explained.
- Deductive order: Start with a general statement and work into specifics that support the conclusion of the general statement.
- Inductive order: Start with specific statements and build them into a general conclusion.
- List: What this post is you’re reading now. Usually headlines for these posts use a number, such as 5, 7, or 10.
- Priority sequence: Rank recommendations, problems, or other items from most important to least important.
Also - it is important to define what the objective(s) of your blog is and know how to measure whether or not it’s meeting that objective. For example, is the ultimate point of your blog to increase sales in your business? Make sure you’ve clearly defined that and are organizing your blog around that objective.
Not sure what the point of your blog is or should be? Buzzgain.com has done much of the work for you by listing out 20 blogging objecitves and how to measure the results. If you’re unsure what the main point of your blog is, it will likely read like you are usure what the point is and certainly won’t accomplish much. Not to mention that it will be dificult to measure it’s effectiveness, an extremily important component to creating a successful business.
