On 6 Oct 2008, at 19:58, MilesTogoe wrote:
okay, we really want to have a company blog as part of our website and looking for advice as to the best way to do it. I guess there are options:
I like having a blog skinned differently from the main company website. Blogs are different beasts and do not fit into the same skin as the corporate/public/marketing website. And, if they are skinned differently, it makes sense that they are not part of the site hierarchy. It is fairly common to put them on a sub-domain (adobe) or a separate domain (Dell), such as blogs.example.com. That's what adobe, google, and the like do. You can (should) still link to it from the main site (and back) however.
Whatever you do, I would recommend WordPress. It is very skinnable, flexible, has a great community, tons of plugins, and has a great API for writing custom plugins. I would recommend against writing your own; there isn't much point with the software that already exists.
1) build the website around the blog (ie use something like wordpress and have the blog dominate - a la tompeters.com
This depends entirely on the type of business that you have. Tom Peters is a consultant company. Please come to them for information. They are trying to be a thought leader. Information is their product, so a blog on their home page makes good sense. If you are GAP or BestBuy, it does not.
2) insert the blog into the web page (not really sure how to do this)
I wouldn't recommend this as it would require you to write your own system or customize one significantly. I don't see the value. I also believe blogs should have a different interface as stated above.
3) have blog on separate linked page and use blog software or service (wordpress, blogspot)
Yes.
4) build own blog as a separate page on the site using php or rails or python - this seems like what 37signals is doing with their signals vs noise blog (one of my favorites)
I would not build my own, but yes, putting the blog on it's own sub domain or sub directory is wise:
http://productblog.37signals.com/ http://www.37signals.com/svn/ At Omniture, we have our corporate/marketing site… http://omniture.com …and our corporate blog… http://blogs.omniture.com/It is running WordPress with a custom skin and several custom plug- ins. We also have a page on our website about the blog that gives people teasers and pulls them into the blog…
http://www.omniture.com/en/resources/blogs …which is dynamically pulling from the WordPress database.
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