Determine Blog Platform Integration – Step 7

Step 7: Determine Blog Platform Integration
For a business, deciding to blog opens the doorway to many possibilities and questions. Some of these possibilities mean taking a hard look at the way things have been done in the past, with an eye towards doing things in a new way that better serve the company’s future.

There are several business website configurations, and your business site will likely conform to one of these:

Single domain, static site
Multiple domains or subdomains, static sites
Single domain, dynamic site
Multiple domains or subdomains, dynamic sites all on the same platform
Multiple domains or subdomains, dynamic sites all on different platforms

Domains are the website address names, such as yourcompany.com.

Subdomains are a way to have multiple sites on a single address, such as finances.yourcompany.com or products.yourcompany.com.

Static sites are comprised of web pages written only in HTML (hypertext markup language) by a person, page by page. This is how all websites were once created, and many are still static sites.

Dynamic sites store all their content in a database. Software on the web server called a content management system (CMS) puts the content together as HTML and sends the dynamically generated web page to a visitor’s web browser. Company employees can add and modify website content using the CMS with little to no technical skills. Most new websites created now are dynamic.

Blogs are the dynamic type of website.

Blog Platforms

There are a great many blogging platforms. By “platform”, I mean any kind of software or service, regardless of where that software is located (you company’s servers or hosted by a third party). However, there are really only a few that you would want to go with. This is due to their capabilities and their widespread support by extensive, knowledgeable communities.

It is important to go with a winner in business blogging just as in many other endeavors, so that your company blog is taken seriously.

They are:

WordPress
TypePad
Moveable Type
Blogging add-ins for other CMS’s, such as Drupal or Joomla. Some of these are native to the CMS, others allow for integration of WordPress or TypePad blogs into the site.

What if You Already have a Website?
Another issue to consider when starting a business blog is what do with the existing site. Here are your choices:

Create a blog as an entirely separate site on its own domain. This allows you to have a different look for the blog compared to the main business site. If the blog doesn’t work out, you can easily “cut it off” since it never was deeply intertwined with the main site. Disadvantages are that your online presence just got a split personality which may confuse some customers, and you still have to figure out a way to link to the blog from the main site.

Create a blog as a subdomain or directory of the existing site. This shows a greater dedication to blogging, which your blog-savvy customers will appreciate. You’ll have to get the blog and the main site to play nice with each other, though. You’ll want visual consistency between the blog and the main site. You’ll have to figure out how to add links to the blog from the main site where appropriate without making it look like you duct-taped your site. This is a common option, and for good reason: it makes sense from all points of view, from blogger, to company, to visitor.

Replace your current site with the blog’s CMS. This option gives you the chance to do that redesign of the old site that probably needed to be done, anyway (hey, it’s not 2001, anymore). The WordPress blog system, in particular, makes an excellent content management system. You don’t even have to have the blog on the home page, if that’s your preference. The win-win in this situation is that not only did you get blogging, but your company’s entire website just got insanely easier to manage. There’s even a secret bonus for doing this: with only a few tweaks, your new WordPress-powered site will probably be far more optimized for search engines than your old site was before.

As you can probably tell, I’m strongly in favor of the last option. The people behind WordPress have plans to continue ah… pressing forward (sorry!) with WordPress’ CMS capabilities, making it even more powerful in future releases.

Exercise: Working Through Blog or Site Platform or Integration

1. Who would you consult with in order to decide what blog platform to use and how to deal with your current website?

2. What are this person’s qualifications for dealing with blogs?

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