Planning Your Blog

60% of your success in building a good-looking, manageable blog will be in the planning & setup.

Functional design goals

Your blog will change and grow with your needs, but like any journey, the better your planning is at the start, the smoother the ride will be.

Here are some things to consider;

• Is the blog primarily rich text content, or is it primarily media-based like podcasts, videos, or photos?
• Can you have different authors for different posts? How many authors can you have on a single post?
• How will you organize your blog articles as it grows? Are your articles grouped by category?
• Do you need #tags to easily find specific sets of articles?
• How will people discover new articles?
• > A recent articles list on your homepage?
• > A featured article in the sidebar of pages throughout the site?
• > An RSS-driven newsletter campaign that sends new articles to subscribers automatically?
• Will you have a search feature for articles?
• Will you show related articles?

Presentation & navigation design goals

You don't need Figma for this. A markerboard or a piece of paper is enough to get you started.

Sketch out these things;

• The Blog Article page what will an individual full-page article look like?
• The Blog articles list page. How will your articles be listed? Will they be presented as tiles, each with a photo or video? What content do you need with each tile? Title, brief, author, date?
• The "featured articles" list, if you want to have the most recent entries on the homepage, how will that look?