Blogging Dos #2: Good Business Blog Layout

I recently received an email from a reader asking for advice:

Hi,
I recently saw your typepad account on small businesses. How does a business get featured on your site? I am an attorney here in St. Louis. I own a music and video production company and am looking for ways to promote it. Also, I like your blog's layout. I have a typepad account but have not really gotten around to making it useful. Any advice on how to do layout on typepad?
Thanks, Ed

How I find blogs
Thanks for writing Ed. Blogs get featured because I find them on my own, through search engines like Technorati or Google Blog search, through lists of business blogs on other websites, or because someone like you has emailed me and told me about their blog or a friend's blog. There have been a few occasions when someone has emailed a suggestion to me and it was featured within a couple of hours. Frankly, I love it when people write to suggest a blog because the process of finding one can take hours sometimes.

Blog layout
As you noted, Pajama Market uses Typepad for its blogging platform. Many readers may know that there are three major blogging platforms: Typepad, Blogger, and Wordpress. If I started from scratch today, it would be Wordpress because it's cheaper and more flexible than Typepad, in my opinion. However, if you have never dealt with the coding end of website design or database management, Typepad is probably the easiest to use.

Typepad offers three levels of pricing. I'm in the middle level ($9/mo) which allows me to use domain mapping so I can have a website address of my choosing for the blog (pajamamarket.com instead of typepad.pajamamarket.com). I did not choose the most expensive plan ($15/mo) because at this point I don't want to deal with templates, although I may change my mind about that sometime soon.

Both the bottom and middle pricing tier of Typepad offer pretty good customization including your own logo, choosing your colors, the format of text, the number of columns your blog has, etc. There are many schools of thought on what a blog should look like, so here's my two cents:

Blogs are the evolution of good website design. What I mean by this is that people visit websites because of great content, not because of a jazzy design with professional graphics. Over time, we have become accustomed to certain standards on the web like the fact that the logo at the top of the page always brings you to the home page of the website when you click on it. A blog is nothing more than these standards being refined more and more until we are left with a recognizable format that is very easy for the owner of the website to add content to.

So what are these standards?

• Logo at the top of the page, as professionally designed as possible, that links to the home page of the site.
• Two or three column format with the main column containing the actual posts, the side column(s) containing navigation and secondary information.
• The side bar should include:
  • An about page with a short biography of the company and links to the company website.
  • Navigation to older posts by the month they were posted.
  • Navigation to older posts by the category of the posts.
  • Contact information to reach the writer of the blog.
  • A search box.
  • A Link to the RSS feed of the blog.
• Each post should include the following:
  • A descriptive title.
  • A "permalink" at the bottom of the post so that people can link to that specific post.
  • The author's name.
  • The date the post was posted.
  • A link to the comments about the post.

Here's the good news. Every major blogging program provides this general format by default, except maybe for one or two things. After creating a blog on one of the major platforms, it shouldn't take more than 15-20 minutes to adjust the format and upload your logo graphic. Navigating Typepad's control panel to make these changes isn't the easiest, but you should be able to make all the changes you need without too much problem.

Tags: typepad, blog standards, standard blog, standard blog format, blog format, blog design, blog navigation, blog components, blogger, wordpress