To blog or not to blog

September 3, 2007 | Leave a Comment

After we finished their site designs, a couple of clients were looking for more interaction with site visitors, so we added a blog. We ruled out traditional guestbooks; even if we spam-proofed them, a one-way form didn’t achieve what the client wanted. The blogs make nice complements to their Web sites, and could be nicely customized to fit the look of the static web pages (See aaronschuerr.com/aaronsblog and gillianswanson.com/resources.) The more my clients adopt blogs, and the more I work with the three that I maintain for business and personal use, the more I think that it is a good choice for new client Web sites.

Some blog themes do a nice job of combining a lot of stable content with dynamic post content (e.g. the Revolution theme that I based this site on), and there are many plugins for the WordPress blog platform that I use. The plugins extend the blog themes to handle things like image galleries, online shopping, spam filtering in blog comments, notifying Google to index your site, et cetera, making it possible to develop a multi-faceted and lively site.

Blog Web pages are assembled dynamically in a browser at viewing time using PHP (server-side scripts) to process and present HTML (for defining page structure), CSS (for styling pages), and your data (posts, page content, and various blog options, that are stored in a MySQL database as you create the content). Traditional Web sites are static; the browser interprets the HTML and CSS and presents the page. Navigation is pretty much handled for you in a blog theme. That is, decisions about presenting blog pages and posts and where are already made in the theme. Unless you want to change that, you won’t have to code navigation and menus the way that you would in a traditional Web site design.

Additional criteria for my clients include whether they want to handle their own updates, how much they update, and whether they are more comfortable with the blog administration interface or HTML editors. There are other factors to compare in a static Web site versus a blog site that I think they should know about. Some of them are listed below. Read more

Posted by Lynn | Filed Under Web Tips, Web Design | Leave a Comment