Setting up Your Blog as a Website

Most blogging platforms make it fairly easy to give your blog the look of a web page. Your simplest solution is to at least have an up-to-date “About” Page.

You might consider also having these separate pages, though: About, Giving, and Contact. Most people who use the Internet regularly know to look for these three pages.  They’re usually right across the top of a page (or “Contact” is  sometimes in the footer.) Your blogging platform probably already has an “about page” for you and should allow you to “add a new page.” (A page is not the same as a post.)

You might consider naming these pages with active verbs to encourage readers to open them. I’ll give alternate names in each section below.

Add an “About Page”

The first thing you should do is work on the content of your “About Page.” As I said, most blogging platforms give you this page, but it’s up to you to fill it in. I recommend at least:

• Write in the first person and in a conversational style.
• Tell them about yourself and about your blog.
• Invite them to subscribe.
• Point them to your top posts (or do this in the sidebar of your blog).

Other titles for this page could be:

• What we do
• Who we are
• Our Ministry
• My Story

You could add links for giving and contact information on your “About page,” however, I recommend separate pages for this information instead. Readers are not generally looking in an “About Page” for how to contact you or how to donate. (Read more in Optimize Your “About Page” on Your Blog.)

Add a Giving Page

We’ve noticed when we send a fund appeal that we get a lot of clicks on our “Join us” page, so make it easy to find in the navigation at the top of your page .You could also have a button to your give.cru.org site in the sidebar of your blog. These are the primary places I want readers to click on for giving. (Read How to Add a Give Button to Your WordPress Sidebar.)

Our “Giving Page” link at the top of our website is actually a direct link to our give.cru.org site. Use Appearance / Menus in WordPress to make the tab on the top of your page a link instead of creating a Giving Page on your site. (See Notes.)

Other titles for this page (or tab) could be:

• How to help
• Make a difference
• Get involved
• Join us
• Donate

Add a Contact Page

Our contact page is simple, I say: “We try as best we can to know our ministry partners, so we’d be delighted to hear from you. Send us an email message to sus dot schmitt at gmail dot com.”

If you do tell readers how to contact you anywhere on your website, never put an address, phone, or email address because “crawlers” can pick these up. You don’t want spam and phishing attacks. I’ll write more about your specific options for contact information in Cutting Out the Spam: Disguise Your Email Address (and Phone).

If your blogging platform offers a contact form, you could do that and not wait for my next post. (I personally don’t have experience using contact forms on a blog, but I understand it’s a good option.)

What are you doing to make your blog into a website?

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Visit the Table of Contents for the You-Can-Too series posts. This post is the third in the website series.  Keep following the series for posts on databases, communication, websites, and social media.

NOTES: 

• Visit MikeandSus.org if you want to see these pages on our website.
• How to recognize phishing email messages, links, or phone calls by Microsoft.
• How to Add a Give Button to Your WordPress Sidebar by eQuipping for eMinistry
• Photo source: MommyBloggersSeminars.com.
• I still have giving pages on our website in addition to the tab at the top and the button in the sidebar. I created these years ago. I’m currently re-thinking them because it’s probably best to make a giving page as simple as possible (your goal is to make it easy for your reader to go to your give.cru.org site). Right now our giving page starts with a story and then endorsements with “how to give” on the bottom. I also have a link on this first page to a second page with all the options for giving. I still like these pages so I can direct an inquirer there if they want to know how to give stocks or something.  Here’s my original post about creating a giving page if you want to consider this kind of page on your website.