WordPress as a news site and blog

WordPress started as a tool for bloggers and then became a popular tool for news sites and has been important in making WordPress the world’s largest CMS.

Updating frequently, writing about interesting and relevant topics is a way to create a good blog or news page. By understanding your reader’s needs and interests, you will succeed with your blog or news page. But even if the content, the text itself, and the information are important, the form of the content and the dissemination are also relevant for you to succeed with your publication.

What are blogs/news sites and what can you learn about them?

In the jungle of websites and web solutions, it can be both difficult to know what is what and what suits you and your needs. Therefore, we thought we would explain the solutions more clearly: blogs and news sites more clearly, the different areas that exist within them and what might be good to think about.

Within blogs, there are two different orientations we thought we would go into a little closer. A private blog, or rather a website that is mainly focused on publishing texts in chronological order. We will explain what can be good to think about in the design of the blog and its content and later explain different platforms you can have your blog on and what it means to use them. We will also explain the difference between WordPress and WordPress so that you know what it means to use these platforms and what suits you best.

The second focus of the blog is to use a blog as part of a digital strategy where the blog can function as part of the website. The blog works as a way to increase content (the content on the page) and can be part of a strategy to promote the website and get more visitors to the website.

We also thought to explain what a news page is and what tools can be good to use in the work with a particular news page, especially if the news page is built using WordPress.

What is a blog and why should you have one?

A private blog, or a blog, is a website that aims to publish image- or text-oriented posts, according to a specific theme and to a specific target group. It can be either lifestyle blogs, fashion blogs, or technology blogs and they try to offer their readers interesting posts.

With a successful blog, large and stable readership, you can make money both from collaborations and from ads. The profession of a blogger is something that emerged during the 2000s and can be both a stimulating and well-paid profession.

Four things to keep in mind when starting a new blog

When you are in the stage of starting a new blog, there are some things that need to be thought through.

1 What should the blog be about? Is it about your privacy, the 70s dress code or the technical development for smartphones? The more targeted the blog is and the narrower the content, the easier the blog will be for the target group to absorb.

2 What look should you have on the blog to convey the right feeling and impression to your readers? How do you format the text to achieve the best readability possible? You do this by thinking about readability in the first place and not hiding or losing the text in color or objects.

3 Drive readers to your blog. How do you get readers to find your blog? By using social media with links to your own blog, collaborating with other bloggers who introduce your blog to their readership, and through advertising, you can share your blog.

4 Get your visitors to become regular readers. Through your content and how you structure your page, you can get visitors to come back. With categories where the visitor can continue to search further in the content and with a flow in the posts, the reader can continue to read post after post. With recurring updates, for example, three times a day, the reader knows that he will receive new information when he visits your page.

What platform can I use for my blogging?

With a newly started blog, it can be both easy and rewarding to use a platform that offers themes and advertising opportunities at no cost. Both to test the form of expression and to create a readership. Examples of these can be as follows:

• WordPress.com (the blog is placed under the domain name wordpress.com)
• Blogger (the blog is placed under the domain name blogspot.com)
• Devote (the blog is placed under the domain name devote.se)
• Blogg (the blog is placed under the domain name blogg.se)

Blogging under your own domain, such as dittnamn.se, you can do by either: buying a domain on the previously mentioned platforms or using a WordPress.org page.

You might think that WordPress and WordPress are the same thing, but they are more different than you might think and we will explain the difference between these concepts a little more clearly.

WordPress.com is owned by Automattic and is a service for creating blogs and websites. WordPress.com is free until you reach up to 3GB in use. WordPress.com is easy to use but is narrow and limited in terms of what you can do on the site. With WordPress.com, there are ready-made themes and looks, but unfortunately, you can not tinker with the code to customize your website.

WordPress.com is suitable for small businesses and blogs, where the focus is on having a website and being able to easily maintain it without advanced features. This is suitable for those who do not have the knowledge, resources or time to build and maintain their website.

With WordPress.org you host your own blog or website. At WordPress.org you can download the WordPress software and install it on your own web server. With WordPress.org, you can create web pages, blogs, or webshops using WooCommerce. However, WordPress.org requires knowledge of HTML to customize the pages.

WordPress.org is suitable for everything from small to large companies, as the possibilities are endless. But WordPress.org requires more knowledge of HTML and can be more complex to set up without the help of a knowledgeable WordPress user. Once the page is created with a theme and templates, however, it is easy to make new posts and changes.

Using a blog in your digital strategy

A blog can be a suitable way for a company or organization to create content for their web presence that can generate more visitors. This is called inbound marketing and can also be part of a web strategy. With regular new blog posts, it becomes easy to spread these posts, and with it marketing the site, and drive more traffic to the website. More content on the website also creates a higher ranking on search engines, as search engines are simply kinder to websites with deeper content. The page view time can also increase, as visitors read the posts and are therefore more likely to stay on the page.

It can be easier than you think to use blogging as part of your digital strategy. As a company, you can both write about news that is interesting in the industry, draw attention to new employees, customers, or products. By writing a post and publishing it, your visitors and customers can get to know the company better and can become more active on the website. By combining publishing posts on the website and social media, the new posts can be spread on, for example, the company’s Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

This provides benefits in the form of; increased traffic to your site, as readers hopefully click on the marketed posts and get into your site, as well as create greater opportunity for you to market your site. If you repeatedly link to your website, your followers on social media will get tired and experience marketing as spam. But if you market new posts, with interesting topics such as: “How to find the right electricity supplier in your municipality”, followers are more likely to go to the site.

What exactly is a news site and why should I have one?

If we think of newspapers like Aftonbladet, the Sun, and Veckorevyn, they all have a web platform that is a news site. The news site can meet different needs. Aftonbladet and the Sun use their news page as an electronic newspaper, where the new news is presented on the start page and the reader can click on the news that interests them. Veckorevyn uses its news page rather as a way for them to get in closer contact with their readers, where they do not present the articles that their printed newspaper writes about, but they rather write about topics that readers are interested in.

A news site works more like a scattered blog, where the reader at first glance gets a broader idea of what different articles are on the site. With a breadth of articles and topics, it is both easy to get a readership that is interested in one of the topics. With a recurring publication, with daily news, it is also easy to build a reading circle that recurs daily. With a large readership and returning visitors, a news site can earn large sums on sponsored news and advertising.

What tools should I use for my news page?

Those who work with a news page are called an editorial staff and as an editorial staff, it is important to be able to change the homepage on the news page. As the homepage is the first thing the reader sees, it is important that it both arouses interest and can be adapted to the latest articles. The amount of news can vary from day to day and some news may need a long headline, image, or video. This means that the design of the news needs to be different and the layout may need to look different from day today. Using a flexible publishing tool, therefore, facilitates this editorial work.

You simply need tools that allow you to customize the layout of your news page, without having to rewrite the code each time. With the help of tools in the form of plugins, the work with the news page can be both streamlined and made easier.

If your news page is a WordPress.org page, we can recommend these two tools that are plugins for WordPress. These are solutions that are both easy to use and offer many different looks and functions.

Check out some of our other articles

• Setting Up a WordPress.com Website the Angry Creative Way
• Open Source vs Proprietary CMS
• The Importance of Design and Content Working Together
• Web Fonts for WordPress
• WordPress for Digital Products & SaaS

Want to know more about blogs and news sites or want help?

As you may understand, there are a lot of forms of blogs and news sites. If you either want to start your own or want help rebuilding your existing blog/news page, we are more than happy to help.