There are various things you need to discuss and sort out for your group blogzines. First, you need to decide on a name. You also need to decide on a design template.
To do this, you'll need to think carefully about your target audience and the overall approach of your blog. So ask yourselves - who are your target readers? What do they need/want from your blog?
Once you're happy with name and design, the blog editors (Aimee or Michelle) need to set the blog up on their account and then invite the other group members on to be contributors. The Blogger Help section has a useful FAQ on this.
Next, you need to think about your editorial approach. Ask youselves:
- How long will your posts be? How often will you post per day?
- What kind of mix of posts will you create - i.e. will they all be short punchy reviews, or will some be longer think/opinion pieces?
- Think about the style and attitude of the posts - are you going to informative, ironic, sarcastic, bitchy? Do you want a kind of house style?
- Think about how you use links - what will you link to and how will you handle links in the posts?
- How will you handle visuals? Will all posts have visuals?
Next, you need to think about your blogrolls - this is the name for the lists of links blogs often feature on the right or left of the screen. You can put all sorts of useful links in your blogrolls. On personal sites, you could have a list of your friends' blogs. Or you could have a list of your favourite sites. If your blog covers a particular area, you could include a list of relevant/useful sites...
Sorting out a link list (as Blogger calls it) is now pretty easy. In its general Help section on layouts, Blogger has a useful guide to adding a link list (and other page elements).
Think about what you want to add to the basic template. What do you need to add so that people know what your blog is about and how to use it effectively?
Next - you need to think about researching your material. Where are you going to get your ideas for posts from? Online? The real world? The papers? Try to identify some key sources for material - remember, you're going to have write around five posts a day between you.
Next, why not try doing a test post or two. You can try out ideas, see how things work, see if the team blog tools work. Once you're happy, try to come up with a plan for ensuring a steady, regular flow of posts on the blog. Is everybody going to post once a day? Or should each person take responsibility for posting on one day? Come up with a plan...
That's quite a lot. But if we get all that done, we should be in a position to go live.... on Monday? What do you reckon?
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