Analytics are a useful source of information about how your blog is performing, who it is reaching, and how popular it is. Setting objectives for your blog based on web traffic analytics is an effective way of improving your site’s reach and uptake.
The University uses Google Analytics to provide web analytics on content within T4 Site Manager and CampusPress.
We have adapted these rules from the BBC’s House rules for comment moderation.
These house rules are for your safety and to keep the University’s website a healthy environment for discussion.
We welcome your comments, but please don’t post anything offensive or illegal.
Specifically, please don’t post anything that:
If a contribution to our website breaks these rules, then it will be removed. This helps us to ensure the website is appropriate for the vast majority of the people who visit.
Developing a successful blog that users find useful, interesting and want to return to requires planning and sustained commitment. Before you create a blog it is important to ask yourself a few key questions, so that you can get the most out of the effort you’ll be putting into creating and maintaining it. This guide covers some of these questions to help get you started.
It is important to consider your motivation for creating a blog and to have an understanding of what you want to achieve by sharing your ideas. Starting a blog just because you’ve seen another department or academic in the University do it isn’t necessarily a strong enough reason by itself as it won’t provide you with the focus your articles need in order to attract a robust audience (rather than just occasional, casual readers).
Examples of a good purpose might be:
With a clearly defined purpose you can start to plan and shape what sort of articles you intend to write.
It is essential to be clear on who you want to communicate with and think about why they would want to engage with your content. You are passionate about the things that you want to share, but who else shares the same passion? Research community? Alumni? Prospective students? Understanding this will guide your decision making around the types of articles that you write, and your style of writing, helping you to create posts that people will want to read and share with others.
If you try and cater for everybody, you will struggle to attract anybody.
Developing an editorial calendar and giving yourself deadlines will help you to create good content in a timely manner. Blogs that are inactive for long periods of time or that only publish content sporadically will not be as effective as ones that can be relied upon to produce regular well curated articles. Frequency and volume are by no means a mark of quality, but if you can’t commit to publishing something on a regular basis, you may want to consider whether this is the right platform for your communications.
People won’t read your blog if they don’t know about it. Make sure you advertise your blog wherever possible: add a link to your website, on any relevant print or online publicity you produce, and encourage your colleagues to include it on their email signatures. Most importantly, make sure to actively advertise your articles on social media after you’ve published them.
You can also encourage users to subscribe to your blog by using the ‘Subscribe by email’ widget.
There is a wealth of online information for you once you are in a position to grow and develop a successful blog.
Finally, make sure you’re following good principles of web writing when drafting your articles.
You should use a supported Microsoft Office 365 ‘intranet’ solution, such as Groups, if you want to create a secure area to share documents and media files to share with colleagues. The University’s Systems Support provides help and guidance on which Microsoft Office 365 solution to use.
If you have an intranet requirement for a multi-institutional blog, it is possible to add users from outside the University to an Office 365 Group.
If an Office 365 solution is not appropriate for what you are trying to achieve please email web-editor@bristol.ac.uk explaining why you need a secure area and we will discuss potential solutions with you.
Staff and postgraduate research students who have a blog on an external platform can move their blog into the Bristol Blogs network. To do this you will need to:
Any external blog that is imported into the Bristol Blogs network can only use themes and plugins already available on the network. For this reason it may not be possible to exactly replicate the appearance and functionality of the external blog.
We cannot provide support for this, so if it is more complex than you expect, you may prefer to set up a new blog manually.
The Bristol Blogs network uses a plugin called Akismet to moderate external comments on blogs. If you have enabled a comments feed this will protect it from spam and offensive language. Further information about how this plugin works can be found on the Edublogs support site.
The Akismet plugin is installed at a network level so there is no need to install it on an individual blog.
The Akismet settings can be found by navigating to Dashboard > Settings > Akismet. These settings will only appear if the site is publicly visible. To change your visibility settings, navigate to Dashboard > Settings > Reading.
Writing for a digital audience requires a different approach than writing for print. The University’s style guide provides a comprehensive introduction to writing for the web and links to other useful guidance.
Different social media platforms require different approaches to writing. For example, Twitter forces you to master the short form, whereas blogs affords a lot of flexibility with word count. Here are our top tops for writing for blogs.
To add a user to your blog, they first need to set up their own account on the Bristol Blogs Network. Give them these instructions:
Once they are registered on the Bristol Blogs Network, the blog’s Administrator will be able to grant them their required access level. To do this:
As a blog owner you may want to add users from another organisation so that they can create new posts, as a regular guest contributor, for example, or because your project is multi-institutional.
To do this, you will need to contact web-editor@bristol.ac.uk with:
Once the user has been added to the Bristol Blogs network, they will receive an email with instructions to log in to their allocated blog site.
Undergraduate and postgraduate taught students are unable to create their own blog. However, if you are a blog owner you can give an undergraduate or postgraduate taught student access to edit your blog. To do this, follow the instructions above for giving access to users from another organisation.
When you set up a blog you have the ability to assign and control what other users can do in the blog depending on the tasks you want each user to be responsible for.
The five roles you can assign users on a blog are, in decreasing level of responsibility:
Administrators can give access to others to edit the site.
WordPress allows you to add content to your site using ‘posts’ and ‘pages’. A post is a timely piece of content (eg an article, opinion piece or news update) that appears in your blog feed. A page is a static piece of content (eg an ‘About’ page, or page listing people or contact details), that usually appears in your site’s navigation menu.
Administrator, editor, author and contributor roles can all create post/pages.
*Contributor roles will have to submit their draft for review to an editor or administrator. Find out more about the difference between User Roles.
As an administrator or editor, you are able to edit any post/pages published or submitted for review by other blog contributors.
As an author, you are able to edit your own posts/pages, but not those written by others.
To edit a post, navigate to Posts > All posts and click on the Edit link under the post title you want to edit.
To edit a page, navigate to Pages > All pages and click on the Edit link under the page title you want to edit.
The Edublogs guide to posts and pages contains a full overview of posts and pages, the differences between them, and more instructions on managing content using them.
