Some people’s professional blogs evolve out of a casual blog that they started running for fun. However, if you want to start a blog that you run professionally right away, you will probably want to make it look professional as soon as you can too. You don’t want your blog to start off looking like an amateur website that doesn’t take itself seriously. If you want other people to take you seriously, you need to be prepared to present a professional image and ensure your blog looks polished. Take a look at the tips below to create a blog that looks and feels professional from the beginning.
Use Good Website Building Tools
There are multiple ways to build a website and various tools that you can use to make the process easier. The long and arduous way to do it is to code the site from scratch but there are other options. Website building tools can make it much more simple to put a blog together, even if you don’t have any coding skills. You can use a no-code website builder to create your site, putting together all of the elements that you need. There are various types of website-building tools. They can allow you to drag and drop the different things that you want to place on your site and see how your site looks as you change it.
Self-Host with a Domain Name
One of the easiest things that you can do if you want a professional blog is to ensure your website is self-hosted and that you have your own domain name. Some people make the mistake of starting their blog on a free blogging site, where their blog is hosted by the site and they don’t have a unique URL of their own. If they then want to grow their blog, it can often involve having to migrate it onto a self-hosted site, which is inconvenient. The WordPress self-hosted option is a great choice if you want to easily set up a professional blog with your own domain.
Cover the Legal Stuff
When you’re setting up your blog, it’s a good idea to cover all of the legal essentials that come with it. When you want your blog to be professional and you’re hoping to make money from it, you should treat it as a business. Some of the important pages to have on your site include a Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, and a Disclaimer. These pages help to cover some of the legal issues that you might come across when running a website. For example, the Privacy Policy will tell your visitors about how you collect their data and what you do with it.
Choose the Right Theme
When you’re using a website-building tool to make your blog, you will often start off with a theme or template to help you begin designing your site. The choice of theme for your blog can affect what features you can choose from and how you can publish and categorize your blog posts. You can find templates and themes for different types of blogs, whether you want to start a blog that focuses on food and drink, reviewing products, or traveling. When you’re looking for the right website-building tools, pay attention to what themes and templates are available, as well as what plugins and extra features you can use.
Get the Look
The look of your website is a huge part of how professional it looks. If your blog doesn’t look very professional, it may be difficult for people to take it seriously. One of the first things that you should start with is a logo that you can use for your site. An official logo will help you to get started with your blog’s branding, giving it the image that you want it to have. As well as a logo, you might want to think about what color palette you want to use for your blog. Some other things to consider include different fonts or other design elements that affect the look of your blog.
Include Info About You and Your Blog
An about page tells people more about your blog and, if there’s a focus on you, about you as a person. Why are you starting the blog? What are your brand values? What topics do you cover and why are you qualified to talk about them? Where does your interest come from? What’s the aim of your blog? All of these questions are things you can answer on an about page or in a bio of you as a blogger. If your blog is focused on you and what you have to say, you might include a headshot and a short bio on your homepage.
Create a ‘Work With Me’ Page
When you’re running a blog as a business, you usually rely on working with other people to bring in money. This could include partnering up with brands that want you to promote their products, writing posts for other people, having other people write posts to publish on your blog. It could also involve offering products or services that relate to your blog, whether it’s social media marketing, content writing, photography, or anything else that you can promote. By creating a page to promote these things, you can ensure your blog looks professional. You might also have a media or PR kit to make things easy.
Add a Contact Page
Making it easier for people to get in touch with you will make your blog more professional. It’s important to be transparent about who you are and how people can contact you if they want to approach you about any work or they just want to send you some comments or questions. Your contact page should at least have an email address, which should have the same domain as your blog. You might include other contact options too, such as social media or a phone number.
If you want to create a professional blog, design a website that looks smart and official.
What are your thoughts? Please share in the comments below. I really would love to know.
Until next time, shine amongst the stars!
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Great tips. With the blog layout and theme being one of the first things that people say, you need to have it looking as good as possible!
Self-hosting your blog is so important. I know it definitely made brands take me way more seriously too.
This is a good guide for all new blog starters. I made a mistake with naming the blog, and now it is too late.