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 instrumental in making WordPress the world’s largest CMS.

Updating frequently, writing about interesting and relevant topics are ways to create a good blog or news site. By understanding the needs and interests of your readers, you will succeed with your blog or news site. However, while the content, the text and the information itself are important, the form of the content and its distribution are also relevant to the success of 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 difficult to know what is what and what suits you and your needs. That’s why we thought we’d explain the solutions: blogs and news sites more clearly, the different areas that exist within them and what might be useful to consider.

There are two different types of blogs that we’d like to look at in a little more detail. A private blog, or rather a website that is mainly focused on publishing texts in a chronological order. We will explain what to consider in the design of the blog and its content and later explain the 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 approach to blogging is to use a blog as part of a digital strategy where the blog can function as a part of the website. The blog serves 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 will also explain what a news site is and what tools can be useful when working with a news site, especially if the news site is built using WordPress.

What is a blog and why should you have one?

A private blog, or blog, is a website where image- or text-oriented posts are published, according to a specific theme and to a specific audience. They can be either lifestyle blogs, fashion blogs or technology blogs and they try to offer their readers interesting posts.

A successful blog, with a large and stable readership, can earn money both from collaborations and from advertisements. The profession of blogger has emerged in the 21st century and can be both stimulating and well-paid.

Four things to consider when starting a new blog

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

1 What will the blog be about? Is it about your personal life, the 70s dress code or technological developments in smartphones? The more targeted the blog is and the narrower the content, the easier the blog will be for the target audience to absorb.

2 What should be the look of your 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 spread your blog.

4 Get visitors to become repeat readers. Through your content and how you structure your page, you can keep visitors coming back. With categories where the visitor can continue to look 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, readers know they will get new information when they visit your site.

What platform can I use for my blog?

When starting a 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 waters of expression and to build 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.se)
• Devote (the blog is placed under the domain name devote.se)
• Blog (the blog is placed under the domain name blogg.se)

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

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 3GB in usage. WordPress.com is easy to use, but is narrow and limited in what you can do on the site. With WordPress.com, there are ready-made themes and looks, but unfortunately you can’t 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 don’t 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 websites, 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 businesses, as the possibilities are endless. However, WordPress.org requires more knowledge of HTML and can be more complex to set up without help from a WordPress expert. However, once the site is created with a theme and templates, it’s easy to make new posts and changes.

Using a blog in your digital strategy

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

Using blogging as part of your digital strategy can be easier than you think. As a business, you can write about news of interest in your industry, highlight new employees, customers or products. By writing a post and publishing it, your visitors and customers can get to know your company better and become more active on your website. By combining posting on the website and social media, the new posts can be shared on, for example, the company’s Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

This brings benefits in terms of; increased traffic to your website, as readers will hopefully click on the promoted posts and make their way to your website, as well as creating more opportunity for you to promote your website. If you repeatedly link to your website, your social media followers will get tired and perceive the promotion as spam. However, if you promote new posts, with interesting topics such as: “How to find the right electricity supplier in your municipality”, followers are more likely to visit your website.

What 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 fulfill different needs. Aftonbladet and the Sun use their news site as an electronic newspaper, where the new news is presented on the home page and the reader can click on the news that interests them. Veckorevyn uses its news site more as a way for them to connect more closely with their readers, where they don’t present the articles that their printed newspaper writes about, but rather they write about topics that readers are interested in.

A news site works more like a dispersed blog, where the reader at first glance gets a broader idea of the variety of articles on the site. With a breadth of articles and topics, it is both easy to get a readership interested in any of the topics. With a recurring publication, with daily news, it is also easy to build up a readership that returns daily. With a large readership and regular visitors, a news site can earn a lot of money from sponsored news and advertising.

What tools should I use for my news site?

Those who work on a news site are called an editorial team and as an editorial team it is important to be able to change the home page of the news site. As the homepage is the first thing the reader sees, it is important that it is both interesting and adaptable to the latest articles. The amount of news can vary from day to day and some news may need long headlines, images or videos. This means that the design of the news needs to differ and the layout may need to look different from day to day. Using a flexible publishing tool therefore helps in this editorial work.

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

If your news site is a WordPress.org site, 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.

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

As you can imagine, there are many forms of blogs and news sites. If you’re either looking to start your own, or want help rebuilding your existing blog/news site, we’re more than happy to help.