On Wednesday we had our first guest speaker workshop for the society. The workshop was by owner of Manchester website design company Gattoweb and fellow blogger Cat Byrne. Cat started her company last year and has recently quit her day job to focus on it full time. She has a set of pre-made purchasable designs for Blogger and Wordpress as well as, selling fully customised blog designs like mine www.beckieione.com (nothing like sneaky self promo haha). The workshop consisted of highlighting the importance of blog design, SEO and a few tricks on how to make customisations to the Blogger templates you start out with.
Blog design is really important as it is the first thing people see about your blog. As shallow as it sounds, sometimes people may see the initial design and judge what quality of content may be provided; it can be the make or break of whether people decide to read what you've been sharing. Cat shared some great, easy tips on how to make small changes that will make your blog design more appealing. Larger, clearer images are important as many people focus on the images rather than the text and if you view your blog, you can right click on any aspect on your page, go to inspect element in the menu and make small changes to your blog elements such as; making text larger or smaller, getting rid of shadows on pictures and changing the font. This can then be copied and pasted into your template html and voile, your blog changes are underway! Google fonts is a great tool for discovering new fonts that aren't readily available on Blogger.
SEO is important for blogs that are self hosted: by that I mean a .com or .co.uk, rather than still having the blogspot or wordpress in your url. SEO is something that allows your blog to come higher up in Google's radar, generating more readers as you're easy to find. It's also a thing companies look at when collaborating with you. Naming your pictures, allowing search descriptions on your posts and using keywords to do with your post topic are all ways to achieve a higher score.
On behalf of the whole society, many thanks to Cat who did a great, engaging presentation and helped people out with their queries regarding all of these topics; really appreciated.
Cat has also very nicely agreed to redesign our blog, so look out for the new changes that will be happening next week!
Cat has also very nicely agreed to redesign our blog, so look out for the new changes that will be happening next week!
We are working on getting more guest speakers into the university, so keep checking the Facebook page for updates.
If you wish to contribute to this blog, any topic is welcome, please don't be shy and contact me on uomblogsoc@gmail.com. This blog relies on your contributions and it's a great way to get involved with the society and get your content out there.
Beckie
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