Sandcurves

Why do you blog? 

I don't mean that in a deeply philosophical way, but there is some use to looking at what the goals are for your blogging.  Is it just an outlet, a bit of creativity or is it a part of a full blown business?

Is your blog your only 'website' or do you have a substantial online presence?

You may be happy with just a simple blog.  If you are on a platform like Blogger, you have little choice.  But if you have a self-hosted website on your own domain, you have many choices for adding extra stuff onto your site. 

I'm going to run through some ideas for what you might want to add to your site, and in some cases a little of how you might do that.  I'll give examples where I know of good ones. 

I do some of these thing myself, but others I've only observed on other blogs and websites. 

This is a rather lengthy post, but it may give you a few really useful ideas. 

Design

If you are considering having other pages alongside your blog you need to consider design very carefully.  The biggest thing is some consistency of design across all your pages.  However, you'll also want to change pages appropriately.  For example, if you have a picture gallery, you may choose to loose the regular blog sidebar on those pages, but keep the regular header. 

Depending on your skills, inclination and time, you'll also need to consider whether you're going to do all those pages yourself, or if you prefer to contract the work out to a web-designer.

Pop-ups vs. pages

Some of the pages I'll suggest don't need to be additional pages, but simply a pop-up on your page. 

Due to the old style the word pop-up has become somewhat of a no-no. But if you are simply using a show-hide div tag, it can be a great way to avoid a total page refresh for very little extra content. 

I have done something like that with my New Here? spiel.  BTW, if there is any interest in some ways of doing this, just leave a note in the comments, and I'll write a little tutorial for it.  It is really easy to do, the only challenge is getting it to work the same in different browsers.  Of course, you could use a bit of easy JavaScript to decide if you want to do a pop-up or a total page refresh…

You simply have to decide what works best for your situation. 

Core Pages

First off, you've got your blog's home page, probably containing a portion of each of your five or so most recent blog posts.  Usually, visitors will be able to go on to subsequent 'archive' pages, which are similar to the main page, but iterate through the remaining blog posts as you go further back.  Each blog post will have a detail page, where the only thing on the page is the single blog post itself, preferably with a unique url, so that others can share your post. 

What a blog is varies so much, that there are thousands of ways to do it, but that is most often the core of a blog. 

But most blogs have some other pages, whether static pages or simply done as a blog post itself, most bloggers will have some or all of these:

• A blogroll:  As I've talked about before, this is often a sidebar element, but I prefer it to be a stand alone page.  Many bloggers are now choosing not to have a blogroll at all, but it certainly was a standard in many blogs.  Here's my blogroll.
• Contents pages:  There are many variations on how to do this, from simple sidebar elements to full pages with things like 'Categories', 'Tags', and most popular posts.  If you want people to stay on your site, give them ways to dig through your content - simple as that. 
• About:  It is certainly considered a website best practice to have an about page.  I very rarely visit a blog or website without checking out the about page, and it influences my decision whether I'll subscribe, follow the authors or company behind the site on Twitter and so on.  If you are a lone blogger, an about page with some of your thinking behind the blog as well as a little bio is a good idea.  Here is a great video on writing a good about me page if you are working on that.  Here's my about page. 
• Contact page:  Easy - a page with different ways that people can get hold of you.  Here's my contact page. 
• Sitemap:  Not only is your website visited by browsers (and clever people using them), but they are also visited by robots - programs that work very much like a browser.  They fetch your page, but instead of displaying it, they dig through the content in certain ways, and usually follow all your links.  You want to make it easy for robots, many of them are there for search engine cataloging - such as the famous googlebot.  A sitemap makes it very easy for the robot to work through your site and know what content you want it to pick up on. 
• Robots.txt:  The sitemap is there to make it easy for robots, but the robots.txt is mostly there to do the opposite.  You can use it to block specific spiders from visiting your site. 

Other pages you may want

The previous section was a stab at what I think are the main core pages of a blog.  But there are so many other things you could do. 

This list is more of a brainstorm of ideas to get you thinking creatively - there are endless pages that you could add to your site.  Hopefully some of this sparks an idea for some of you hoping to build a more meaningful blog/website. 

• Help/Support:  Especially if you are blogging about your own product or about something like an open source project, a help section can be very useful.  Usually this will point to various resources and have it's own contact section.  Normally I see these sections on blogs of large companies or big open source projects, but I don't see why it can't be a great way to increase the usability of your site, regardless of what you're blogging about.  You can just use it to point back to old blog posts that provide tutorials. 
• Twitter welcome:  If you have an interest in blogging and social media, a great blog to follow is Pushing Social.  But I'm not making a plug for the blog.  When I started to follow @pushingsocial on Twitter, I noticed he had a great link in his Twitter bio:  http://pushingsocial.com/about/thanks-for-following-me.  It's a great idea. 
• Guest Post Policy:  I've noticed that many blogs have a guest post policy page.  Guest posting certainly is a great way to get traffic to your own site, and simply having the policy page lets those who would like to guest post that a particular blog my be appropriate for them to try. 
• New Here:  You never know what people a potential visitor is going to land on first.  I sometimes create pages just to answer people's questions, like this one where I answered a question someone asked on Yahoo Answers, and created a page to explain how to do the JavaScript thingi that they had asked about. They could end up on my home page, and since the little explanation is hardly what I regularly do on my site, I'd like to get them up to speed quickly so they either stick around or don't waste more of their time.  As you know, in my case I've done the 'new here' section as part of all my core pages…
• Subscription page:  As we have more and more ways for people to follow us, I think it is getting a better and better idea to have a full subscription page, where people can choose if they would like to follow you with a reader, on Twitter, by email, or in some other way.  You could also use this page to offer free products such as an ebook or a newsletter sign-up. 
• Products page or pages:  Do you blog about a product?  If you do, it would certainly be appropriate to have a squeeze page for the product.  I've often seen this on blogs were the blogger has a book.  A great example is on the Four Hour Work Week blog by Tim Ferris for his "The Four Hour Workweek" book You could have a whole series of pages as a catalog or shopping site. 
• Sign-up or membership portion:  Self explanatory. 
• Search Results page:  If you embed a search engine in your site, of course you'll need a page to display the results.  An easy one to use is Google, and you could do it with your Adsense account if you want to make an extra few cents a year. 
• You could have an affiliate or monetization policy page.  This is not only a good idea, if you are monetizing your site, but may also help you get out of a legal tangle.  You create a page that says something to the effect of "If you click a link, it is possible that the link will lead you to a product that is for sale, and I might make a buck if you buy the product."  Of course, you don't want this page to be soliciting clicks. 
• Picture gallery, games, video:  Do you produce stuff?  Why not include some gallery pages. 
• FAQ:  If you are teaching or talk about a product, a very useful thing to have is a frequently asked Questions page. 
• A survey:  Want your reader's opinion, create a survey page.  You could write your own or simply use one of the many surveying software available. 
• PDF files:  If you have some useful stuff, you may want to offer some of it as downloadable Portable Document Format (PDF) files. 
• Tutorials:  This is something I'm toying with doing more on this site, I'm really eager to write a good beginner CSS tutorial or JavaScript tutorial.  The Django Blog Engine tutorial I did was a lot of fun to write, and seems to get a good amount of traffic.  If you're learning interesting stuff, why not do something like that yourself. 
• License or Copyright policies:  Copyright is obvious, I guess.  If you have other stuff, such as a PDF tutorial, you could use a Creative Commons share alike link as a way to get more traffic for your site.  Others can host your tutorial on their website, but must keep it in it's original from, which includes a link and bio about you and your site.  You could just share stuff to contribute to the greater good of humanity? 
• Commenting policy:  I think the main reason why people have a commenting policy is simply to get more comments.  That's not a bad thing, and perhaps it is a good thing to do. 

I'm sure that's enough ideas to give you months of work!.  Hopefully somewhere in there I sparked an idea that is right for your blog or website. 

I'm sure I missed many ideas, and if there's one that you think should be mentioned, tell us about it in the comments.

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