6.12.1 Firstly, what is a blog post?
Like a diary, you would write a blog post to relate about what's been happening perhaps in your school or class over recent days or weeks. You might also make reference to future activities to give the website reader something to look forward to. Like with a diary, ideally you will keep the blog posts quite regular so that the website visitor has something new and interesting to read whenever they visit.
We often set up blogs on school sites so if this is of interest to you, get in touch so we can set the system up to support your blogs.
6.12.2 What does a good blog post look like?
A good blog post should contain a healthy size paragraph of information which is both informative, entertaining and realistic.
The information provided in this paragraph (and it can be more than one paragraph) should ideally be related to the curriculum so that website visitors can understand exactly what has been going on in a particular year group or classroom.
In addition, though not mandatory, it sometimes helpful to support the text with some complementary photographs in the form of a small gallery.
Together, the gallery and the text form an engaging page for the website visitor.
6.12.3 What does a blog post not look like?
Well, often people think that a blog post is nothing more than a series of photographs taken to record activities in school or class. But this is seen as a poor way to use blogging because without contextual information the images do not fully convey what's been happening.
6.12.4 How does a blog work?
With respect to your website, a blog is simply a list of articles which belong to the same category and are displayed on a page in a format that gathers those articles together and shows them with the most recent article at the top of the page.
So, in order to create a blog post you need to add one additional step to your normal article creation process. This additional step is important in that it tells the website which blog page your post will be seen on. This is done by choosing the correct Category when you create your blog post through the article manager.
6.12.5 What categories might exist?
All schools are different and therefore it's difficult to explicitly declare the number and names of categories which might already exist when you look on your website. However, in order to try to be consistent, when we support you in creating your blog categories we generally name them such as "Reception Blog" or "Sports Blog".
By choosing the appropriate category when you create your article will allow the website to display your article on the appropriate blog page.
Note, if you fail to choose the correct category when you create your article or, if you choose the wrong category, then your post will not appear where you expect it to!