RICKONATOR

When it comes to blogs, you want to showcase several areas at once to your visitor so that you have multiple opportunities to capture their attention, and they have various choices to make short of clicking out of your site.

While some bloggers like a magazine style theme that offers a multitude of thumbnail sized previews, most bloggers stick with a simple two or three column WordPress layout instead.

The header will always go across the top of the blog, and beneath that you’ll need to decide if you prefer a wide column with a thinner second column, or a wide middle column with two thinner columns on either side.

Both have their pros and cons, but there’s also something else you can do. There are plug ins that you can use to create columns within your blog posts or pages. These are similar to the magazine or newspaper articles you see in print.

Some bloggers like a two column theme because it gives them a larger content area to work with. You have more of a focus on text and your message than you do advertisements and images in the sidebars.

The only problem is, if you have a lot of widgets or ads you want to place in a sidebar, only having one is going to make your blog scroll for a very long time. This is where a three column theme is better.

Most people don’t know this, but there are also one column themes (primarily used by photographers) and even four column themes! You might use these with one column acting as navigation, another as a content holder, one for advertisements and the last for a calendar, for example.

WordPress Page Versus Posts

As far as content goes, you can create pages or posts (or both) in your new WordPress blog. There are some differences. Let’s start with creating a landing page on WordPress and then move onto the management of the other pages and posts.

You may want to create a landing page for your blog, so that whenever someone types in your domain, this is the page they’ll see first (as opposed to a blog where the first post seen is always in order from most recent to oldest).

Log into your dashboard and click on Pages in the sidebar. Next, click on Add New. Create the landing page that you want. And publish it. After it’s live, go to Settings and then click on the Reading link.

At the top, it will say “Front Page Displays” and this is where you can choose to display “a static page,” and it will provide you with a drop down menu of pages that you can set as the static landing page your visitors will see first.

You can do the same thing with a post if you prefer to make it a post rather than a page. If you do it this way, just make it a sticky post that stays at the top of your blog at all times, rather than showing the reverse chronological order for entries.

Pages typically aren’t listed according to any dated order. They sometimes appear in the bar across the top of the WordPress theme. If you prefer, you can add a widget in your WordPress sidebar to display the pages.

To do this, go into Appearances, then Widgets. Drag the Pages widget over to your sidebar wherever you want it to appear to your visitors. And you can create sub-pages for your WordPress blog, too.

Click on Add New to the Pages area. On the right, you’ll see an option for Page Attributes. You can assign a Parent page for it. And you can even put the pages in any order you want them to be seen.

Your sub-pages would then appear under the parent page in the URL. So let’s say you have an About page on your blog. And under it, as a sub-page, you want a page called Services. Your domain would then look like this: domain.com/About/Services.

You could add more sub-pages below that, so your URL would look like this: domain.com/About/Services/Pool-Cleaning (to use that niche as an example). Whenever someone hovers over your main page in the sidebar or header, they would see the sub-pages branching out.