Blogs help drive traffic to your site. For example, imagine that you’re a pants retailer and you write a post about how to pick out the right pants for each body type. Someone searching online for that concept could easily land on your blog post, and then decide to buy some pants.
If you want a good-looking site with a blog, create one quickly using a template. You can choose from a variety of blog-friendly templates in the Marketplace. (If you’d prefer to build your own blog, check out the Build a Blog course.)
While every template is different, each blog has a few different components:
example.com/blog-post/build-your-own-jeans
vs. example.com/blog-post/tweed-chinos-are-in
Next, learn how to use your blog.
The SiteStudio lets you separate your content from your page design. So deleting a page doesn’t mean you lose content. You can also use the same content in multiple places.
The SiteStudio separates content with content sets. This content set is where you’ll enter your blog’s text, images, author names, and so on.
This content is used on multiple pages. For example, information about your blog is probably shown on your blog home page, on the individual article pages, and maybe even on you your main home page.
If started your site from a template, then you might already have a content set.
To see your content sets:
Tip Once you’re comfortable using content sets, add new fields to your content set (like video or author’s favorite color). You can then add those fields to pages that use the content set—like your article or blog homepage.
Next learn how to add, edit, and delete blog posts.
To add a new blog post:
If you're working on a post, but not ready to publish:
On the Publish Status dropdown at the top, select Draft.
Note Draft posts will be visible on your site’s Preview URL (click the Preview button at the top right of any page), which looks something like example.site.moboom.com
.
When you're ready to publish, select Published. And if you want to delete the post, select Deleted. Of course, click Save or Create at the bottom of the page to save your changes.
You can bold and italicize text, and you can add links, headings, and quotes. You can also create bulleted and numbered lists.
To do all that, you just select the text you want to format, and then click a button.
Here are some more details on how to:
So to add any formatting to text:
To add bold formatting, highlight text, and then click Bold —or press ⌘+B (on a Mac) or CTRL+B (on a PC).
To add a link, highlight text, and then click Link . Next paste in a URL, and then click ✓ (or press Enter) to save.
To add a quote, highlight text, and then click Quote .
To add a heading, highlight text, and then click
or .
To add a bulleted list, highlight text, and then click List .
To remove formatting:
To remove a link, highlight the link, and then click Link .
To add an image to a rich text box:
Just by pasting in a link, you can add videos (for example, from YouTube or Vimeo) and even tweets from Twitter.
If you’re not sure if a link will embed properly, just try it out. (The full list of websites that you can embed from is over 1,600!)
To embed a video, tweet, and so:
Here’s an embedded tweet.
Here’s an embedded video.
Inside the studio, you can view your content, and you can view your pages (the article page and the blog home), but if you want to see individual posts, you’ll have to navigate to them outside the studio.
To preview individual posts:
However, don’t think that you have to publish a post to see it. Draft posts will be visible on your site’s Preview URL (click the Preview button at the top right of any page), which looks something like example.site.moboom.com
.
When you click the Preview button, you are taken to your site’s Preview URL, where you can view draft posts and unpublished pages.
So get blogging already. Here are a few last minute tips: