The majority of Small and medium sized business owners pay external companies and consultants to design and build their web sites. This means that when they have new information which would update the web site, there is then a concern over the cost and delay in making changes to the site. The result is often that the change is never made to the site which becomes out of date and less relevant to the business.
One very easy way around this situation is the use of a Blog. – If you do not have an easy way to add news to your web site, then why not use a blog, linked to, but separate to your web site upon which you can post news and product launches.
So the first question is which blog system to use?
There are free blog sites onto which you can setup your company blog, but I would respectfully suggest that this is not good place to put your company information. You do not have guarantees of quality, control or the ability to customize.
There are also charged for blog sites onto which you can buy space, but although better, there are still many restrictions with the space, content, and layout.
We mostly host WordPress based web sites. These use the very popular WordPress blog format, but as we host the content, then we have total control over the system. WordPress has many dozens of ‘plug-ins’ and pre-defined layouts available. By hosting ourselves, we can use any of these and then change anything, and so choose exactly the layout or options, and even be able to integrate information with another web site.
We can then provide a ‘managed’ blog service, where the customer has full control and can add pages and blog items where and when they want to, but we retain a login to help with system updates and installing any widgets or plug-in to deliver more features to your customers.
Such added value items often include
- Anti-Spam monitoring of comments added
- Pages that are Search Engine Friendly
- Ability to Tweet announcements of new posts
- Create Google Analytics monitoring of the blog
- Add videos from U-tube or upload your own