How to: design an effective journalism blog

Video guide of the basics of designing a blogspot page: more tutorials by wvteks available here.

When designing a blog to present journalistic work there are certain elements that need to be included in its construction. These elements include:

A strong layout

One blog user suggests on Blogntrepreneur that:

"There is a golden rule when it comes to page layout in design, which is that everything on the page should be there for a reason. This same rule should apply to your blog. So to do this, remove anything unneccessary on your blog."

To achieve this it is important that you have in mind what messages you want your blog to contain. In this blog it is important that the content is clear and straight to the point so by having only one column and no widgets this look has been achieved. Additionally added a page banner at the top of the content still maintains a simplistic look but adds organisation to the content and interlinks with the content. Blogger as a blog creator allows the user to add additionally widgets and columns but always bear in mind  how this will affect your blogs aesthetic.


Tags
One blogger user stated that:

Tags not only allow people and search engines to find your content easier, but they can also help you organize your site

Tags are an important way to organise content as well as improve the chances of your blog being noticed. In this blog tags have sometimes included Twitter tags that link to the online promotion techniques being employed. Additionally these tags directly link to the pages at the top of the page e.g. data journalist adding an organisational structure to the blog. The tags you choose to accompany your posts must highlight the important parts of your content and also your blog. 


Copyrighted images
A blog isn't visual enough without strong images that relate to the content, however you can't just take a photograph or image from the internet and put it in your blog you have to acknowledge the graphics origin and copyright. Online images can be bought through websites such as iStockphoto but some images are available for free provided you reference where you got the photo from directly. Flickr is a great example of a website where copyright is important but also a great source of images. There are different levels of copyright under the umbrella of creative commons on Flickr which include:

Attribution:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give you credit.

Non-commercial:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work – and derivative works based upon it – but for non-commercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike:
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

To see this information in more detail with further explanations visit the Creative Commons website.

To get images from Flickr use the search engines and check the creative commons before using an image. For this blog photos are highly important and below is a visual guide to how copyrighted images from Flickr were used in this blog:

Another way to obtain images for a journalism blog is by looking through official companies websites. In this blog the main subject matter was the London 2012 Olympics so by going through their official Olympics websites images are available. With all companies search their sites have press sections that you should search for. In these sections they sometimes have a section for images that you can use on your site which are free of copyright. This is what was used on this blogs header to create a strong visual identifier for the blog and to emphasize what the blog is about. You can find more London 2012 Olympic images through their press site here.

All of these elements need to be considered when making a blog. Think about how you ultimately want the blog to look and use these techniques to show your blogs meaning and style.