Posted by I have been blogging here for about eight years, but hadn’t ever written a blog series until recently. By this, I mean a series of blog posts, on one topic – in this case, five blog posts on web design, which I planned out in advance, and published weekly.
Outlining the blog series
I had written the outline of the blog series back in December 2013 because I was thinking about teaching a course on web design. However, the opportunity came and went as opportunities do sometimes, so, I left the outline up, as it works perfectly well by itself, with the intention to come back and revisit it some day.
In September of this year, I was invited to give a presentation with the title: A good website is not necessarily a pretty one. This got me thinking anew about my outline on web design. So, I wrote up the presentation as a blog post (and changed the clunky title to What’s the story?) which became the first in my web design series and I gave it to my audience as a handout.
I had originally conceived this first blog post as one about infographics and visualisation, which would build on a visualisation blog post I wrote a while ago called Visualisation: Information is power – just avoid drowning in data, but as my presentation preparation and blogging went on, and inspired by Berner’s-Lee’s first website, I realised that it doesn’t matter how many beautiful pictures or infographics you have, it is not enough unless you have a clear underlying message for your website. If you have a clear message, it can be described in words, perhaps even in two minutes like the Hollywood elevator pitch, which can be accessed by a screen-reader as well as illustrated visually and served easily to your various users because your site is built according to web standards.
However, storytelling, narratives and infographics are big subjects which I decided as I was writing that I will come back to, because I find them endlessly fascinating. So, I concentrated on the subject of having a clear message, leaving out the lovely visuals, in the first blog post and then once it was published, I wrote four more blogs on other aspects of web design.
Linking the blog posts
Thanks to the original outline, I had a specific topic to cover in each blog post:
- What’s the story? What is the message behind your website? Can you deliver it in an accessible and usable manner to your users regardless of their device?
- Getting to grips with your user’s experience: Identifying and getting to know your user using personas, stories, journeys, scenarios, and requirements.
- Being content with your content: Designing a content strategy.
- Sharing is caring on social media: Promoting your site on social media.
- Evaluation: Techniques to measure how well your website is working.
On publishing the new blog post each week, I would link to it from the outline blog post and then at the top of the new blog post I would link to the introduction blog post (the same outline post as it really is an introduction) and the previous week’s blog post (e.g., in part 2, at the top I put links to the intro and part 1), and at the bottom, I put a link to the next week’s post (e.g., in part 2, at the bottom I put a link to part 3).
One at a time or all at once
At problogger.net, Darren Rowse recommends planning out the series by creating a draft of each blog post and then writing one a day. For him, this reflects his way of working, which contrasts with his colleague Eric’s approach of writing them all together before scheduling them for publishing, e.g,. one a day for a week.
Eric’s approach chimes with mine better, because in part one of my web design series called What’s the story? I had a section entitled No Lorum Ipsum about using a core information design approach described in a great article on AListApart.com by Ida Aalen. However, when I got to part three about content: Being content with your content, I realised that this section would fit better in this part so I cut it out and put it there instead, which would confuse anyone who was searching for it in part 1.
I would like to write a whole series and then publish it, but I know realistically that I would take months over it, and my site would not have any new content appearing until I had finished. At the moment I have a goal, which I rather like, of publishing something once a week, so even if I do have to go back and cut bits out because they fit better in another post, I still enjoy that sense of achievement of weekly publishing.
When is a series not a series
I have some other blog posts which I think of as a series, but I haven’t linked them because they were not written as such. Usually, when I write a blog post I do so because I want to think about a particular topic. For example, a while ago, I wanted to think about emerging technologies and so I wrote a blog post on the topic. Once I had posted it, I realised that I wasn’t quite finished and wanted to think some more about emerging technologies and so I ended up writing two more blog posts. I have done the same with storytelling (three blogs) and also with social media (at least five posts and counting). Flicking back through these blogs, with a bit of shaping they could be linked together, but I like them as they are.
I tend to write super long blog posts like these: Digital Culture and Feeding the machine: the embodied user in a social media world because blogging is the best way for me to research a topic, think about it, and then, write it up. It is only once I have written a blog post that I feel I know what I am talking about. I guess at that point, before pressing publish, I should look at the text, turn it into a series, and schedule a series of posts like Eric, which would be good for me, as my site would then consist of smaller, easier to read blog posts. I definitely clarify my thinking while I type. Look out for my future smaller blog post series.
Writing a planned blog series was a bit of a different experience and a great one, which I enjoyed. I will definitely be doing it again and recommend it to all you bloggers out there.
How do you plan and write your blogs? Leave a comment below.
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