Picking a Blog That is Right for you
You've decided to add a blog to your business website. Blogging is a popular way to add fresh content to your website that positions your company as an expert in your field. It can be a great way to attract visitors to your website, build your email list, and ultimately make those readers your customers.
But how do you add a blog to your website? It all depends on your content management system (CMS). Many systems have an option for a blog program that you can add, possibly with an additional charge.
At LRS, we use a content management system we designed and built ourselves: LRS Antilles Content Manager, which includes the option of a blog module that you can manage alongside the other pages on your website.
Choosing a content management system and blog software can be a daunting task. When beginning your search you may ask yourself:
- What are the best blog platforms?
- Which blog is best for me?
- How can I try blog software?
If you find choosing blog software is not so easy, I'll outline the 6 features that are important when choosing blog software. As not just web solutions experts but also bloggers ourselves, these are the features we wanted in our blog
What are the most important features of blog software?
1. Ease of Use
First, any blog content management system has to be easy to use. No blogger wants to spend hours just trying to figure out how to create a blog post or add a tag. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes to understand how to create a blog post, add images, add metadata, tags, and add schema.
Our user experience experts continually test our modules to make sure it easy for our clients to use. It won't surprise you to know that I used the LRS Antilles blog module to write this post. Here's what our blog post looks like behind the scenes:
You can see it's really easy to use. Just fill in the fields like a form, and you're on your way!
Want to see for yourself? Watch our 2-minute video about the blog module.
2. Support from Real People
Who do you call when there is an error with your blog? The best website teams provide help that's just a phone call or email away. At LRS Web Solutions, our customer support team is among the best out there. They can assist with questions or resolve errors very quickly. This type of support is not something you'll find with other big-name CMS blog platforms.
3. A Really Good Content Editor
The ability to format blog content the way you want to see it without needing to know HTML or other programming languages is essential. A blog author will expect to be able to easily insert images, move content, organize the structure of their post, and format text as they see fit.
With the editor in the LRS Antilles blog, you're able to do all of these things while managing blog posts. Plugins from other Antilles modules can even be added to a post. Do you want to embed a form in your blog post? No problem, the plugin manager will let you do that in a couple of simple clicks.
We use a content manager called Article that is very easy to use and flexible with lots of options for designing your post or page. Ask us for a demo!
Read Blog Best Practices to learn how to optimize your blog posts
4. Ability to Manage Many Bloggers
It is important to maintain a consistent message throughout your blog posts. If multiple authors are posting to your blog, you'll need to have robust user management and permissions.
LRS Antilles, as the content management system, provides a rich user management. We can establish roles and permissions for your blog authors. You can provide granular permissions for posting and publishing. This allows certain people to have permission to post blogs live on the internet, while allowing others to work on the platform and save drafts for later editing and publishing.
5. Share Share Share
The whole point of a blog post is to have as many people read as possible. Your blog solution should provide a simple way for readers to share posts across popular social platforms. If blog readers can easily share, your content will be seen by the people in their network, extending your reach exponentially.
LRS Antilles gives the ability to share blog posts out of the box. With one click, users can share on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Of course, the team at LRS Web Solutions is constantly updating our content management solution as well as the blog module. So fear not, when that next social platform comes along, the blog module will soon have support for sharing it as well.
6. Built-In SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is an ongoing mix of strategies and tactics to make sure your website pages show up when users run a search on your topic keywords. Make sure your content management system allows you to write unique metadata for your blog posts. That way, you can rank for the spectacular blog post you're going to write. Many platforms make it confusing to figure out where to put metadata like page title, meta description, and schema.
LRS Antilles includes a cool SEO tab that lets you easily create blog titles and descriptions for search engines. You can also get a "score" to find out how optimal they are for the search engines.
Stumped by SEO? Get started with these blog posts about SEO or ask us about our ongoing SEO services.
Which Blogging Platform Should I Choose?
There are so many options available it can certainly be difficult to narrow down a list. My advice is to test several platforms on a trial basis. Determine what features are most important to you and pick a few CMS Blogs to try out. There are plenty of poorly designed blogging platforms out there. Take the time to see which tool is the best for your business. Check out capterra.com to compare blog platforms.
Also, check out Antilles reviews on capterra.com.
LRS Antilles Content Manager
Of course, our preference is our own LRS Antilles blog module. It's simple to use, yet a very powerful blogging platform. Our goal is to make website software that is easy for company teams to use with a design and user experience that your customers love. Whether your site is simply a blog, or you manage hundreds of pages of content in addition to a blog, LRS Antilles can be a fantastic tool to help streamline your work.
We believe our blog module is one of the best blog cms solutions out there. I'd love to show it to you. Just contact me.
You can try LRS Antilles for free. Try it free today!