WideRange Galleries websites come equipped with a fully integrated, gallery-based blogging system. Utilizing the blog to post frequent photo journals, trip reports, and/or articles is a fantastic way to add relevant and interesting content to your site, which is important to build a following and keep them coming back to your website. This in turn builds traffic and boosts your website's SEO juice.
The WideRange blog is managed much like all the other galleries in your admin, with one main parent gallery that acts as the main blog page, then its sub-galleries act as the individual “posts”. Each gallery post – just like the normal galleries – can have a variety of layouts to choose from, but the most important for the blog is the “Large Photos” gallery format which displays all the photos at full size on a single page interspersed with text, much like a normal blog or article page.
Photos can be inserted or uploaded one by one into the gallery post’s text area (similar to how it's done in WordPress, for example). Or you can simply upload or include a batch of photos into the gallery, rearrange them, then add additional text in between the photos. These tools enable you to quickly build out a photo journal post much more quickly and efficiently than in other blogging systems such as WordPress.
How to set up and use the Blog
These screencasts will guide you through the process of setting up and adding blog posts. Note that you can speed up or slow down the playback speed at the bottom right; you can also expand the videos to full screen to see better.
Introduction to the Blogging Platform:
Initial Blog Setup:
Adding Blog Posts:
Polishing some Blog Options:
The Difference between the Blog and the News page
The Blog is a full-featured multi-page blogging system, featuring standard blogging components including post categories and tags, related posts, commenting, and an RSS feed (so that people can see when you add new posts). The Blog is great for posting articles, trip reports, photo journals, news, or any type of post to share your photos and thoughts.
The News page is just a simple, single page on the website that displays short news items and has no special blog features.
If you have no desire to start a blog and you just want a simple place to post occasional news or announcements then the News page could be sufficient. Otherwise the Blog is far more powerful. If you use the Blog then you might not need to use the News page at all (but you still can if you want to).