How To Make Your eLearning Blog Look Good: Blog Design And Structure Can Make It More Appealing For The Readers
Most modern organizations are serious about the culture of continuous learning. The culture inculcates the thirst to know more and share it within the confines of the organization as well as beyond. To nurture the culture of learning and sharing, organizations create blogs which not only showcase latest achievements of the organization, but also become the hotbed for collaborative discussions and learning. An eLearning blog is also a way to market your content and invite the right kind of audience to see what you are all about. An interesting mix of content will keep your audiences entertained and engaged. And the way your blog looks and feels will make sure they think of you when they need your services.
There are some golden rules to follow when creating an eLearning blog. It is best to keep your blog design clean and logical. Use the right colors and fonts to make sure that your content is readable. While these will set the right tone, most successful blogs try a little hard to create the “wow” effect for their audiences. Here are some that are the most successful:
- Make the content searchable.
Over time, your blog will be a useful resource for gathering knowledge. Make sure that the readers are able to find the information they are looking for quickly by creating a “search box”. If it is not available readily on the blog site that you are utilizing, it is worth the effort to get it developed and make sure it works. While most blogs have yearly or monthly archives, many readers have certain specific information needs and do not prefer to waste time browsing through the content. For these readers, the search capability on your blog will be an added bonus and make sure that they will come to the blog more and more for their information requirements. - Attention grabbing excerpts.
To make the home page of the blog more interesting and inviting for readers, make sure that it does not have an overload of text. Sure, the readers need to find the articles that interest them but you do not need the entire content to entice the readers. Just two or three sentences that describe each post can create a teaser copy that gives a fair idea about each post. This makes it easier for the readers to browse through recent posts. It also does not increase the amount of duplicate content on your blog. - The right images.
The blog is all about the written content but only text and no relief is a strain on the readers. A lot of free sites can be utilized for getting appropriate images. But most of these cannot be customized or tweaked to accompany the articles on your blog. Subscribed image galleries however provide images that can be customized to include text, headers or even merge two images to create a perfectly suitable image. Customized images do not take too much time to create but make a world of difference for the success of your blog. - Add widgets.
Small interactive buttons or ‘widgets’ can be added to make the blog more successful. Various types of widgets can be added to grab the readers’ attention and make sure that they can find the information they are looking for. Popular blog widgets can be ones showing popular posts or recent posts – these give the readers a fair idea about the nature of content on the blog and show them the right direction. - Comments make your article popular.
It is a wise decision to enable comments for all blogs you post and encourage readers to share their comments or views. This starts a two-way discussion on many topics – related or unrelated which can be a fruitful learning experience for all involved. Make sure that every comment is acknowledged and answered. If the comments have been dwindling on your blog, questions or polls can also be included to spark the readers’ interest. - Provide related content.
Once the readers’ read your article, he or she may like to know more on the topic. Make sure that you provide the way for similar articles within the blog or from other resources that you have referred to. This provides the opportunity of continuous learning and invokes the thirst to know more. You can invite readers to share related articles as well that can be included in the list, to help others.
These are some ways that can give your eLearning blog an extra edge and help you gain the learning as well as marketing objectives that you have set. With the addition of appropriate content and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, the blog can be a platform that brings success to the entire organization.
