How to Start a Business Blog, Part 6: Blog Platform and Site Issues, Continued

This is part 6 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.

Another issue to consider when starting a business blog is what do with the existing site. Here are your choices:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. The WordPress blog system, in particular, makes an excellent content management system for even large websites, as well as small. 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 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.