How we approached it: social icons that follow you and an email capture on every page this one is pretty straightforward: if we wanted people to engage we had to make it easy for them. That means social media links and email signup. To make sure that social media was as accessible as possible, we made our icons sticky, so they follow you down the page (but also subtly designed, so they don’t intrude with the reading experience). For email signup, we decided—for now—to buck the pop-up-lightbox-sign-up trend, and instead integrated a signup at the bottom of each page. This may be something we come back to in the future. 6. Easier blog management The backend of the blog should make writers, editors, administrators, and developers' jobs easier.
And it should be built in such a way as to allow scaling. How we approached it: one backend and a multilingual plugin it's easy well the special leads to doing a quick visual overhaul on your blog design. But that doesn’t often solve management problems. We’ve grown, and we’re still expanding, and our current system wasn’t cutting it. It took a lot of research, and some trial and error, but we ultimately decided that the best solution for us was to set up our multiple language blogs on one backend, and to use the WordPress Multilingual (WPML) Plugin. This took way more of an effort to implement—we had to manually associate all of our categories, tags, and previously translated posts with their counterparts in other languages—but ultimately makes our jobs easier.
There’s one design and one stylesheet for all blogs. If there’s a technical issue, developers can troubleshoot and fix it once. And if we want to translate content, we can easily pull over the post and keep images and formatting intact. (Or switch them out if that makes more sense). Logo design trends in English…French… And German. It was certainly a headache at the time, but investing in our infrastructure puts us in a way better place going forward. (And was just in time as our Japan team decided to build out a Japanese blog right about the same time we finished this project!)