What is a blog?

It’s a question I’ve been asked — and trying to answer — since I started writing one in 2004.   We know that blogs are regularly-updated websites.  We know that some blogs are written by individuals, some by companies, some by professionals or amateurs, but these days anyone can write one (and lots of people do).

And despite what some pundits may tell you, we know there are certain rules to blogging:

1)  Good blogs are a service to their reader.  They offer the reader something with each post, and the reader comes away fed (and therefore comes back);

2)  Not all good blogs are well-written — but like every journalistic form before it, the spelling, grammar, punctuation and basic structure of a blog are strong indicators of the quality of its content.  Given that it costs the same to read a professional blog as an amateur one, mastering these elements are an important part of drawing and maintaining a readership;

3)  Blogs are both artistic and technical endeavors.

It’s this last item I want to address — it is no longer possible to be a mainstream writer with no technical savvy.  Every heart-on-her-sleeve liberal arts major among us is having to master certain basics in order to enter the arena.  I can’t program a universal remote, but I can code basic HTML, and I’m able to dig my way through style sheets to find a typo on my side bar if I absolutely have to.

But I’m no coder, and I know it. 

To make my blog great, I need help.  I need a Word Press specialist, someone who can execute a punch list that looks like this:

• Move the top bar up so it is even with the letter “d” in the header;
• Add comment function to the top and bottom of each post;
• Collapse posts after the first four on the main page, but not on the archives;
• Add a tagline in the top right corner that changes on each refresh.

My blog is my creative face to the world, and it is my business and it has to hit my reader full in the face with humor, wit, energy, right on page load.  I know what it has to do … but I do not have the technical capacity to execute it.

Now, here’s the flip side of that coin:  most coders don’t have communications backgrounds.  They are experts at computer language and engineering, but they don’t have a long history of ordering information for maximum creative and emotional impact.

And what’s more? — Generally coders and journalists are not illustrators.   A great editor knows how to set art on the page to light up the content, and a great coder can place the artwork precisely.  But creating graphics and logos is the work of a visual artist and is almost always a completely different person than the other two.

So here’s the moral of the story:  a really great blog needs a team of three to make it great.  It needs an editor who knows how to order information and deliver a package of content for maximum impact.  It needs an artist to use color, form and design to deliver a visual story.  And it needs a programmer to pull all of those elements together and make it work quickly and cleanly every time.

If having a blog is important to you, if it’s worth doing more than signing up for a free account and pre-made template, then it is worth your time to consider the anatomy of  the blog.  Recognize that very few people are competent at more than one element of blog design, and you’ll need to put some thought into what matters to you before you decide who is best to help you.