Using Footnotes in Blog Posts

Blogging is quite a conversational medium, and that can often lead to distractions halfway through a particular train of thought.

Sometimes brackets or dashes are enough to set these thoughts aside - like this, for instance - from the rest of your sentence, without breaking the flow too much.

But when you're into the swing of things and suddenly realise there's something that needs clarifying, you might not want to restructure your entire sentence to try and fit the explanation into the middle.

This is when footnotes are useful; there's nothing wrong with using them, and unlike some online-only techniques, they're a recognised literary technique that shouldn't put off your readers.

But how do you use them in a long blog post, when your reader may need to scroll several screens' worth of text before they reach the end of your article?

Happy 7th Adferversary!

September 18th 2013 is officially seven years since my first day of work at online news agency Adfero.

It's already more than two years since I left Adfero - and as regular readers will know, they've since rebranded as Axonn Media and shifted from news to a more general web marketing structure - but this is still a special date on my personal calendar.

That's because, on September 17th 2006, I was a recent graduate still cooking chicken burgers at McDonald's, while the following day, I was an online news correspondent - which, essentially, is what I still am today.

While I now write in a much broader range of styles, including blogging and static web content, as well as for print, I'm proud of the nearly-five years I spent at Adfero, and the massive amount of content I produced during that time.

I'm pleased to still be in touch with some of my most valued colleagues from Adfero - many of whom are now working or travelling in countries all over the world (they're an adventurous bunch...!).

And it's nice to be able to add another year to my official career history, with another major milestone coming next month as well.

From October 2013, it will be a frankly terrifying 15 years since I first started developing websites and writing online.

My first major contribution to the web, those of you who know me will already know, was www.donnaair.co.uk, a fansite dedicated to the TV presenter and all-round fashionable gal Donna Air.

It's gone through several incarnations over the past 15 years, and as a labour of love, it tends to suffer slightly when I'm busy with other things, but it's very much still on the go.

So, depending on which way you look at it, I either have seven years of experience at what I do, or very nearly 15 - not a bad achievement if I say so myself, and a number I'm looking forward to watching grow in the years to come.

Cheap Custom WordPress Themes

If your blog is hosted on the WordPress website, there's only so much you can do to customise the theme.

But if you have a WordPress installation hosted on your own website, at your own URL, there are few limitations on what you can achieve - it's just a case of knowing where to start.

Cheap custom WordPress themes can be hard to come by, without them simply being 'off the rack', with standardised colours and graphics.

I take a different approach - and for a fee of around £50, depending on how much work your blog needs, I can alter your current standard template, to give you your own unique colour scheme that's consistent across your homepage, static pages and posts, a hyperlinked masthead based on your own image, or an acceptable royalty-free stock photograph, and customised navigation bar, sidebar and footer links.

The standard themes that come with a WordPress installation are not really intended for anyone to use long-term as their own theme, as far as I'm concerned, but they give you a good starting point with all the necessary functionality built into it for posts, category pages, comments, and so on.

While most cheap 'custom' WordPress themes are just more off-the-peg templates, or are not really cheap at all, I can work on what you've already got to bring it in line with your brand identity, for a flat, affordable fee.

If you're interested, I'd urge you to make an initial enquiry and we can agree on what you want and need before I start any work.

As always, before having any work done on your blog theme or template, you should back up your page templates, along with your pages and posts - but when the work carried out is largely cosmetic, there shouldn't be too much to worry about.