Your Blog Doesn’t Have to Look Like a Blog

Lots of people balk at blogging. They think it’s a time suck. They’ve got “nothing to say” or they “don’t have time”. They don’t want to build a blog and then have everybody see it never gets updated. These are all valid arguments but it’s important to note that a blog doesn’t have to be a daily diary of what’s going on in your life or your business. It doesn’t even have to be apparent that it’s a blog to take advantage of the up-side of blogging. In fact using something like Wordpress and a good theme for it like Thesis can result in a web site that doesn’t look at all like a blog but takes advantage of the benefits of blogging.

Don’t use posts
You don’t even have to use the posts feature. Instead create blog pages for each of the subjects. If you’ve got a lot of content you can create drop down navigation so people can drill into the site easily.

Turn off comments
You don’t have to allow people to comment on your posts or pages.Turn it off, or if you’re comfortable with code you can delete the line of code that pulls comments into your page.

Turn off the bylines and dates

In Thesis this is a one-click operation.

Alternatively you or your coder can do it in the source code.

Think outside the box
If you use a theme that allows you to get rid of the sidebars and traditional blog structure the possibilities are really endless. Just for inspiration here are some wonderful sites built in Wordpress.

TableTalk a shopping site based in Tucson Az.

Ginger Restaurant uses the right colum for the navigation instead of the traditional sidebar contents

Ford Motor Company’s auto show site has a magazine style layout but doesn’t look “bloggy” at all.

Exploratorium Press Kit Built in Wordpress to fit the exact look and feel of the rest of the website.

Camacho Cigars incorporates Flash and lots of images but you can still subscribe to the RSS feed for updates.

Yvonne Chiu a beautiful showcase for her phtography.

Tagged as: Blog, Business, Wordpress