Building My Website (6): Adding the Blog

Latest update — I’ve added the Blog section to my website, and the Blog Homepage now looks like this:

The Blog link in the global navigation menu had linked to this Medium blog, but now offers a dropdown menu. The menu offers an option to go the same Medium Blog or the same Blog hosted on my Webflow site.

Challenges

There were a few challenges in getting the Webflow blog up and running. First, I was waiting to have enough articles written in various categories that provide enough content to fill up the page.

Next, I tried adding a dropdown provided in the template to the global navigation menu, so that I could keep a link to the Medium blog along side the Webflow one. The one provided in the template is more suitable for a fat menu with a lot of links. I was eventually able to get an out-of the box dropdown provided by webflow working.

There are integrations available between Webflow and Medium that would connect the two so I may merge them at some stage. For now, I want to show how I can build up a Blog on a Webflow site, but also keep writing on Medium, which gets more traffic at this point.

The other challenge was in getting the Categories pages set up, and specifically, the Categories menu. The Webflow CMS used to enter the content was very straightforward to use, and I could pretty much copy and paste articles across from the Medium Blog. What was an issue was updating the Blog category names provided in the template, and having the correct one highlighted (as shown below):

In figuring this out, I first realised that the Blog Homepage is a separate page from the Categories page, that pulls in all content, and always has the “All” category highlighted.

The Categories page is built dynamically based on categories selected for each Blog active in the CMS. The tricky part here was that the webflow template I’m using has some logic in it specifying that the category menu item before the first dynamic category menu item should not be highlighted. So for my Blog, it was necessary to specify that the first category in my list, “Building My Website”, should not have the menu item before it highlighted, i.e. “All”. Once that was updated, everything worked very smoothly.

Next Steps

For the blog posts themselves, my next steps will be to keep writing more, improve SEO on the webflow site, and trying to get more posts published and read on the Medium site.

As far as the Webflow site goes, I want to add an About section that will cover my experience, training and tools used, that will serve as a type of Resume. I also want to add menu items to make all of these items available by category. For example, clicking a link for Product, UX, Lean or QA would lead to a page with my experience, training and tools specific to that area.

This will require a bit of ideation and design before implementation, so again I will have to take it step by step

‍