Create a responsive blog

Posted by Sebastien Giroux on June 11 2014

Blogging is a great way to establish yourself as a leader in your field. Writing posts about issues in your industry allows you to position yourself as an expert, showing visitors to your site (i.e. potential sales leads) that you’re authoritative.

Furthermore, combining business blog marketing and traditional website marketing is especially effective when you start up a new business. Blogging is one of the fastest ways of announcing your business and spreading the word quickly about what you do.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create a responsive blog using Ekomobi.

Video Transcription

Hi, everybody. My name is Sébastien Giroux and what I’m going to do today is show you how to create a responsive blog using Ekomobi. The first thing you need to do when creating a blog using Ekomobi, is to enable the blog function in the experimental feature. So you’re going to [inaudible 00:17] your admin, you select the site you want to modify and you click on “Experimental.” And that's going to add new buttons into your editor. For example, the “Categories” button, which we're going to be using later on.

So next, what you want to do is create your categories within your blog. So for us, what the blog’s going to be for is for teaching our customers about how to create websites, so we're going to add categories related to that. So here I’m going to create the first category, so the “Getting Started” category, which is going to hold all the blog posts for helping people getting started with Ekomobi. Since I’m going to do a lot of web design and theme tutorials as well, so I’m going to create a category for that, so “Web design/themes.” And finally, I’m going to add a third category for search engine optimization web analytics, so I’m going to call it “Search Engines Optimization” for now. Okay, so I’m just going to save it.

And now, what I notice is that I will maybe capitalize all the letters. I’m just going to edit the second category and change it and click “save.” So now all my categories are saved.

Next, I want to create my first blog post. So in order to do that, I’m just going to create a normal Ekomobi page. So in my case, I’m creating a tutorial with video tutorials with a little bit of text above the tutorial, and then the actual link to the YouTube, and then the transcription below it. So the things I want to change in there are different than a normal page. I want to add the author, which in that case, is going to be my name, so “Sébastien Giroux”. And I want to add the publication date as well for the blog post, so I’m going to select the date that the post was created. I want to add a thumbnail because that’s going to show in the main blog page, the thumbnails. I’m going to disable “Show in the menu” because I don't want all the blog posts to be shown in the dropdown menu. And then, I’m going to show a side column so that the blog posts will show the side column. And I’m going to select the categories for this blog post. So now, I’m going to save the page. And then, I’m going to reload the editor and we'll see the change being applied to the page. So click on “reload.” And see now, we have the blog format with the actual website.

Next, what I’m going to do is insert blogs into my page to make it more blog-specific. So the first blog I want to add is the author’s blog, which is going to be… going to insert automatically the authors of the blog post inside the blog element. So I’m going to go in my blog and drag it here. So I see it has automatically “Posted by Sébastien Giroux.” And the next thing I want to do is make sure that the author is exactly the same as the author that I have inside my Google Plus account. So once Google sees a correlation between the “Posted by Sébastien Giroux” and the actual Google Plus name. It’s going to add the Google Plus picture right next to the search engine ranking, which is going to help a lot for people to get credibility and to click on the search result. Okay? So you want to add the author’s blog.

Then afterwards, what you’re going to do is add a discussion at the end so people can comment on your blog post. So we're just going to go all the way to the end of the blog post. Here's the transcription. That’s why it is that long. But I’m going to go at the end of the blog post and I’m going to drag the “Disqus” block at the bottom. “Disqus” is a third-party software that we're using for comment within Ekomobi. So I’m going to click on the settings of this blog. And then I’m going to add Ekomobi, so all discussions concerning this website will be under the Ekomobi tag name. So now if I go look at the page, and you'll see when I reload, I’ll see the “Posted by Sébastien Giroux on May 29” appear automatically. And then at the bottom of the post, we're going to be seeing the discussion, the forum block.

Finally, what I want to do is create the blog’s main page, so that’s going to be the landing page for the blog. So in that case, it’s the parent page of all the items. So what I’m going to do is hide the children of that page. I’m going to click on the “Never” and the children will never appear for this page. And then I’m going to drag the children’s list blog layout into my page here at the bottom of a little bit of text. And then I’m going to edit the page settings. And I’m going to make sure to show the side column, the blog format, so I’m going to save that, and reload my page. See, now I have the children’s list as an in-blog format, along with the categories to the right. So now if I go back to my main blog’s page, I see now it’s in the blog format with the categories. And if I click on the title of one of the articles, I’m going to be redirected directly to that article, again, in blog format, okay?

So that covers the tutorial concerning how to create a blog with Ekomobi. If you have any questions, be sure to contact us at support@ekomobi.com.

So thank you very much. Have a good day. 

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