Weebly offers simple blogging platform with various customizing options. Basically, you need to add a blog page and start creating posts to build your blog. Weebly will show you the default editor with drag and drop elements when creating and editing standard pages. However, you will see a different blog editor with additional set of elements when editing your blog page and posts. In addition, you may also easily confused with blog elements in the sidebar as some of them can only be used on blog page while some can be used on both blog page and posts. In this article, we will show various Weebly blog elements available in blog editor and explain how to use them on your blog.
Summary of Weebly Blog Elements
Here is a summary of options and elements that you can use only on Weebly blog and not on standard pages:
- Special drag and drop elements
- Blog feed options
- Social sharing options
- Apps for Weebly blog
We will discuss all available Weebly blog elements in the following sections.
1. Read More Break
You can find “Read more Break” element under “Basic” group of elements when you open blog page or edit/create blog posts.
Drag and drop this element on your content area on the blog post to add a break line. When the post is showing in your blog page, users need to click on that “Read More” link to read any content below the break. When your blog post is longer enough it is a good idea to display the first paragraph and provide a read more link. Interested users can click on the link and read the complete content. Learn more on how to use read more break in Weebly and customize the appearance.
Note that you can add read more break only inside blog posts and not on blog page or standard page content.
Weebly Blog Sidebar Elements
Below is the list of special elements only visible on Weebly blog editor grouped under “Blog Sidebar” category:
- Flickr Batch
- LinkedIn Button
- Blog Archives
- Blog Author
- Blog Categories
- Blog Feed
You can add these sidebar elements on Weebly blog sidebar area when you open blog page in the editor. In addition, you can also add them inside the content area of blog posts by dragging and dropping like any other elements. The “Blog Sidebar” category elements will disappear when you open on any other page to edit.
2. Flickr Batch
Use this element to add the photo stream from your Flickr account on the Weebly blog sidebar. After dragging and dropping the element, you can add your Flickr username, email under “Advanced” section and customize the columns to adjust the widget on your blog post or sidebar area.
3. LinkedIn Button
This is a good way to add your LinkedIn public profile URL for the users to follow you on LinkedIn. There are six styles of buttons you can select and we recommend adding this on your blog sidebar so that it appears on all blog posts.
4. Blog Archives
Show monthly blog archives as a link on the sidebar or inside your blog post.
5. Blog Author
Showcase the details about the blog author by adding this element to your sidebar or inside blog post. If you are the author running own blog, this is a good way to add your picture using image element along with author element and show key information about you.
6. Blog Categories
Each blog category is identified with an URL and indexed by the search engines as a separate page. This means a blog post included in a category will be indexed by the search engines as three pages as below:
- Individual blog post with the title as page URL.
- Included in the category with category URL.
- Included in blog index page.
Therefore, make sure to use categories in Weebly blog and add the links in blog sidebar using “Blog Categories” element.
7. Blog RSS Feed
Drag and drop “Blog Feed” element to add RSS feed link to your blog. Users can then bookmark your blog feed to check the latest content. You can also use subscribing services like Feedburner so that users can subscribe to your blog feed to get latest content on their email inbox.
8. Weebly Blog Feed Reader
Earlier, Weebly was offering “Feed Reader” element which was also available on normal Weebly editor. Feed Reader was a brilliant way to add a blog feed in any of your site’s pages to update the visitor about your recent blog posts. However, this has been removed and you have no in-built option to show your blog feed. Fortunately, Weebly blogs still have a feed URL which you can use with third-party feed readers like FeedBurner or Feedly. By default, you can access Weebly blog’s RSS feed using one of the following URLs.
https://www.yoursitename.weebly.com/1/feed
or
https://www.yoursitename.weebly.com/your-blog-page-name/feedIn case if you add more than one blog page to your site then the number will be added incrementally to 2/feed and so on or you can use the corresponding blog page names. The number of posts showing on your feed is as number of posts shown on your blog page. You can control this under “Settings > Blog > General > Posts per page” and Weebly allows to show maximum of 25 posts with minimum as 1 post. Note that you can also submit your blog feed URL to Google and other search engines like XML Sitemap.
9. Social Sharing of Blog Content
All Weebly blog posts include Facebook Like and Twitter tweet buttons on the bottom of content before the comment form. Besides this and other blogging elements Weebly also allows you to share posts on social sharing sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can enable share buttons under “Settings > Blog > General > Post share buttons”. You will see the sharing buttons when publishing or updating the post and click on it to share your blog post on Facebook and Twitter.
10. Weebly Blogging Apps
There are limited number of apps you can find in App Center to enhance the blogging experience with Weebly. Using these apps, you can add recent posts, insert multiple columns and customize the appearance of the blog sidebar. Unfortunately, all these blogging related apps are premium only and there are no free apps available. You need to pay a one-time fee to connect the apps and start using on your site.
Final Words
Weebly blog elements are cool ways to create an appealing blog that you can use along with your business site or online store. We recommend using common elements like LinkedIn profile button, archives, RSS feed, author and categories on the sidebar to showcase on all blog posts. There are also free apps available to group elements and add background colors to make them look beautiful.
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