segrogan

superbarnie:

We don’t take the design books too literally. Blogs can be part of a site and incorporate some branding but on the other hand should be a thing of their own. I find advantages to both and definitely prefer to write html from scratch for some purposes. Any page can be linked into a WP site using the custom Menu features under Appearance–at least for most themes I expect.

Below are two links to 2 examples that are used for teaching, research, and service. Both have a home page that is a html5 fixed static page built with dreamweaver. For the older superpac example, this is the home page. For the new MPOll, we have decided that there need not be a precise home page. Three options fly out for Home under a sub-menu on insights.mpoll.org. The older superpac site has numerous pages of information linked to its home page found through nav-bars on each side and across the top–most use a template of the DW homepage. Additionally, there are now about 75 WP-blog sites linked to the home page installed on various sub-domains of:

wejustwantstephencolberttocometoourcollegesuperpac.org

This site is in process of being remodeled. The whole thing was done in the fall semester of 2012 with students providing most of the content. The navigation contained topics for students to chose from. Some were not chosen–and may still be under construction. (Students were assigned to prepare a web essay on one of the linked topics for the main site and also were assigned their own associated blogs.) At the same time, students were involved in civic engagement projects with the community–and web development and blogs sometimes were not the highest priority. It was also a first time for any of this–no DW, WP, or blogging prior experience. Not a techie. 2014 class links on the nav were just added but they don’t link anywhere yet because the pages have not been written but we have just about set up 19 WP sites for the spring class. The superpac essentially is a student class-oriented project site targeting young adults primarily. The html or DW pages are much the same. The blogs share the logo and primary color scheme but do not even have the same precise header for branding without much ado otherwise.

We are in the process of extensively remodeling the superpac site and also creating another system like this that is geared towards a wider audience and professional contributions: mpoll.org

There is a link near the top on the left sidebar of mpoll to INSIGHTS. That should take you to the blog. The blog has a link back to the HTML home page but Home on this site is a fly-out with three Homes to chose from as I see it as a more distributed concept than usual.

You can make child pages and do all of that but there are ways to make this simpler. I could take a screen shot of INSIGHTS–I would tend to do this at 300 dpi–not to get better resolution from the screen than what it is but to have enough resolution to work with without degradation. For instance. I could take an image of my left sidebar on the Insights blog and float it left on my front page and put hyperlinks over the words which would actually make for a more streamlined, maybe more responsive, site.

Not all the links work yet and we are still muddling through exactly what we want at this point. I do not see a need to have a blog look exactly like its “parent” site. You can brand them easily with logos and whatever other detail you feel is really necessary so that people will recognize the connection. If your blog front page looks like a blog–people will make that connection and look for the usual navigation. I don’t see a need to make the two precisely the same.

The point is the answer to your question depends on you and what you want to put into it. Our focus is on the content. I am no expert in any of this. My advice would be RELAX and not to get too hung up over ideas that pages must all look alike, consider webbrewers advice and consider the tradeoffs.

best regards–(gotta do some real work now)