How to Format Your Blog

Yesterday was the first ever Blogher Food Conference.  I spoke on a panel called, “How Blogging Best Practices Apply, No Matter Your Blogging Niche,” which was a lot of fun.

The moderator of our 75 minute panel was Alanna of kitchenparade.  Other bloggers on the panel were Kalyn from kalynskitchen.com, Michele from wine-girl.net and the adorable Lolo from veganyumyum.com.

Many topics were covered during the discussion of How Best Blogging Practices Apply; the subject I discussed was Macro and Micro Formatting of Your Blog.  Because the panel moved at the speed of light, I thought it would be nice to post some of the strategies I covered yesterday at the Blogher Food Conference here on my own blog.

Everything in the world, in the universe has form and content.  We all need to have a simple, clear structure (form) for our blog in which to present our content (what we write).

First, let’s look at Macro content, the overall content of a blog.  A good blog is well organized, user friendly and easy to navigate.  Further, a good blog is clean, and in my opinion calming.  This is a strange thing to say, so let’s take a minute and look at what makes a blog calming?

Sparse clean design (though of course there are exceptions to this that include the oxymoron “busy clean design;” which would include veggiegirlvegan.blogspot.com and dooce.com.

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Calming design, which includes the repetition of format/font will also help you draw in readers-think about meditation which is the repetition of words, or yoga which is the repetition of asana, both of which calm the mind.  By repeating your blog structure consistently via format you create a calming and familiar environment for your readers, which is key to pulling people in, in this busy, fragmented and chaotic world

Next, on a very practical level, let’s discuss what tools are needed in formatting your blog to be simple and easy to use:

• Consistent url and header
• Search bar -at upper left or right of blog, underneath the header
• Clear menu- to help readers navigate your blog
• Categories for recipes (and printer friendly recipes)
• Comment section
• Frequently Asked Question section
• About page with photo of you
• Subscription- easy way for readers to subscribe to your blog via email or rss feed

In summary, for overall macro structure of your blog –its format, placing key items such as those above in easy to find open spaces will draw readers to your site.

Blogs have a Macro Structure (the blog format) and a Micro Structure (the post format).

So, for the Micro Structure of your blog, what strategies can you implement in order to simplify the format of each of your posts?

• Start each post with keywords that sum up the entire post; this is good writing style and will also improve your “searchability“
• After summarizing the topic at hand I like to add a personal tidbit, something that relates me or my family to the topic (food) at hand
• Recipe -make it stand out and easy to find, this is the “meat” of your post!  I use a grey drop screen to set it apart
• Formatting your recipe -format each recipe exactly the same way for the ease of your readers; I use numbered steps
• Write a conclusion and perhaps add some other bit of news, to sign off to your readers

In sum, format each each post simply and consistently.  Even if your blog and post structures differ from mine, and they will, have the intention of repeating your chosen structure in each post to create a place of home and familiarity for your readers.

Finally, in this busy world where there is so much media content, much of it over stimulating, it will be calming and subliminally attractive to your readers to find a place of peaceful repetition that they can come back to again and again.