Last updated on February 1, 2023
Considering using SharePoint Online for blogging?
Reading: How to create a blog in sharepoint online
Fortunately, creating a SharePoint blog easy. If you’ve used SharePoint Online, you must have already experienced it.
In this article, I’ll show you how you can easily create a SharePoint blog site and display your articles on it, including the home page.
Let’s get started.
Why create a blog in SharePoint Online?
SharePoint Online is quite flexible. If you’re already using it in your organization, I don’t see any negative reason not to use it.
Here are some great ideas for using SharePoint Online for blogging:
Document unique experiences
Would you like to share some unique experiences you had related to your work in the organization?
If so, use SharePoint Online to record those experiences and sharing them automatically with your target people is easy.
As I said before, if your organization already uses SharePoint, that’s a good reason to use it to post your blogs as well, so others can easily do so Check it out.
Publishing and sharing research
Are you a researcher for the organization?
If that’s the case, don’t advise me You research, compile your findings into a document, and then share that document in SharePoint.
But what if you can shorten the process? How about writing directly to a SharePoint blog to publish your work directly to others in the organization?
Share department news and trends
Share regular news and trends with your department?
If that’s the case, writing a blog in SharePoint might make it easier — especially if your department has its own website.
You can even use the same blogging features to share use departmental reports and display them separately from blogs on the home page.
Collaborate with external users
Share your knowledge with external collaborators in a roundabout way?
Well, using a SharePoint blog is a great way to collaborate with others — especially around ideas and knowledge.
Now that SharePoint has great sharing capabilities, you can also coordinate projects between different teams that lead to different belong to companies.
Documentation of important projects
Last but not least, you can also use the blog to document important aspects ts of different projects — like the challenges, problems and even detailed instructions.
Depending on how you configure your SharePoint Online blog, you can make the posts available to the entire organization to learn from one project to another.
This allows you to increase engagement and increase the spirit of collaboration across the organization.
Note: If you need information on creating a project site, see this guide: How to create a SharePoint Online project site: step-by-step step.
How do I create a blog site with SharePoint Online?
The good news is that creating a blog site with SharePoint online is not complicated. I’ll walk you through each step:
Step #1: Create the blog site first (optional)
See also: How to Create a News Website: A Quick Guide to Success
This step is optional simply because you want to use the blogging features in SharePoint can always be used on any website you have.
You can use an existing website or create a new one. Others choose to create a new one for the following reasons:
- You want a new site to serve as your “main” blogging site.
- You want one Users set permissions that are unique to the other websites they have (e.g. the blogging website is open to everyone).
- The blogging website requires a different level of permissions (possibly to all open) than the existing sites.
- The main audience of the site are external users (such as customers and remote workers).
To create a new site:
- Go to the Home of your SharePoint tenant (Home button)
- Click the Create Website button “
Select in the right pane select Communication Website:
Why a communication site?
Well, if your main goal is to have a SharePoint blog site, then a communication site is the most logical choice as that is the main purpose of this type of site.
All that’s then left is the Complete the creation of the new communication website. You can also change the look to whatever you want before we proceed.
Step #2: Create a site column in the site page library
A little background on the site page library:
This is a special document library , which stores all pages on the site (both those you create and those created by the system).
Note: Technically, document libraries are still lists, which means that You can create new metadata (columns) in a library.
In this case, we’ll add a new column in the library that we can use later to filter only blog pages when pages appear on the home page
First, let’s navigate to the site’s Pages library:
- Click on the Settings cogin the top right corner of the screen
- Select “Site Content” from the options
Locate and click the “Site Pages“ li brary:
Once in the site’s Page Library:
- Click on the “Add Column”
- Select the “Choice” option from the list
Im right pane:
- Enter an appropriate name for the new column (eg. B. “Page category”)
- For the selection you can follow what I used below (Blog, News and Page)
- Click on the button “Save” at the bottom of the panel
A little explanation here:
This company lumn categorizes the pages in the site’s page library. That’s why I used the three basic types of pages you could create for your website.
On the other hand, feel free to add more choices if you have other categories you want to include (eg “Research” or “Guide” or something).
Step #3: Prepare a page template for your blog posts
If you have a page template (think blog template) it will be easier and faster for you and your users to create a new blog post.
Now creating a template is easy duplicating a page along with its configurations, so all you need next time is fill in the title and content.
But first you need to create a new post:
- Go back to the home page of your SharePoint site
- Click the New” in the command bar
- Select “News post”. ” from the options
From there:
- Select the template you want to start with (I we recommend the “visual” option)
- Click the Create Post” button at the bottom right
On the new post :
- Configure it as you like
- You can also change the layout
- Add any web parts you want to include in a blog post
- Click the Page Details button on the command bar
In the right pane, make sure the Page category is set to a blog:
See also: How to Create Email Groups In Outlook (Step-by-Step Guide)
Save then the page as a template:
- Click the Save drop-down buttonfrom the command bar
- Select “As Save Template“
Note: To create a website from a template, read this tutorial: How to create a SharePoint Website from a Template: Complete Tutorial.
Step #4: Start Creating Your Blog Posts
Actually, this is part k ann be last. But I want to put it right here so you can at least see how this is all going to work on the homepage.
In this step, we’ll use the SharePoint blog page template we created in the previous step and take it from there .
To do this:
- Go back to Home
- Follow the steps to create a new news post again
- This time select the newly created blog template
Finish your blog post and then click Post News button on command bar:
That’s it. When you start adding content in the future, just repeat the above steps using the blog template.
Step #5: Add a modified News web part to the home page
The final step is to add a news web part on the home page that only displays blog posts (you can have more than one news web part).
So:
- Go to Homeblog site
- Click the “Edit” button in the top right
If you want to add a new news web part:
- Hover over the desired area to add the web part
- Click the Add button add
- Search and select the News
web part
How to configure the News web part to display only blog posts :
- Click the Pen button of the web part (while selected)
- In the right pane, configure the Filter strong>Options
- Set the filter optionsthe correct property (see below)
Publish Visit the blog site again and you will now see a section that only shows blog articles.
Benefits of using a blog in SharePoint Online
A SharePoint Online blo g has many advantages. Here are some of them:
1. Easily Categorize Content
Similar to how you can categorize pages in the site’s Pages library, you can further categorize each blog post into different topics.
In fact, you can organize different publications of a site and categorize them into themed content collections.
You can also display them separately on the home page - - just like you can display blog pages and news posts separately.
2. Automated archiving of classified content
SharePoint Online blogs are automatically categorized by date.
This means you can always find an entry by searching for the month or year in which it was created.
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It can also help with many other things if you want to sort important archive information later.
3. Rating
SharePoint Online blog readers can submit their own comments and even click the Like button.
You can use these features to measure reader interest. It’s also possible to use it to determine the overall value of your blog on SharePoint Online.
It also helps that each article you write has its own views count. There is also a page analysis feature that you can access.
Do you still think you will use SharePoint Online to create a blog site now? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
For any questions or other concerns, please use the website’s contact form to reach me and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
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