This is part 5 of a new series on how to start a business blog, and is aimed at businesses of all sizes. In these articles, I’m going to address business-specific concerns and requirements for business blogging.
Step 6: Determine Blog Platform and Blog / Website Integration
For a business, deciding to blog opens the doorway to many possibilities and questions. Some of these possibilities will challenge the company’s culture to reinvent itself in order to stay current with the times. 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.
There are several business website configurations and your business will 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 and products.yourcompany.com.
Static sites are comprised of web pages written only in HTML (hypertext markup language). 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 webserver called a content management system (CMS) puts the content together as HTML and sends it to a visitor’s web browser. Company employees can add and modify website content using the CMS with little to no technical skills. Most websites nowadays are dynamic.
Although some web designers/developers are using WordPress as a CMS (content management system), this is still quite rare. Likely, your company’s website is not a WordPress site.
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 (your 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 widespread support by extensive, knowledgeable communities and so that your company is taken seriously. They are:
- WordPress
- TypePad
- Moveable Type
- Blogging add-ins for other CMS’s, such as Drupal, Joomla, or Microsoft SharePoint. Some of these are native to the CMS, others allow for integration of WordPress or TypePad blogs into the site.
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