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Business Blogging - Introduction | TwentyEleven Web Design
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Business Blogging – Introduction

The word blog is short for web log and refers to a web site written in a diary format, with regular entries (or posts) by the blog author. Blogs can cover any topic and can even be written by multiple authors. Perhaps the best way to familiarise yourself with the format is to read one of the more popular blogs.

What do blogs look like?

Blogs tend to list the most recent post at the top of the page, with the posts getting older as you scroll down. This tends to be the model your readers will expect, and most blogging software is configured this way. A typical blog post includes a title, the body of the post, optional images, the date and time of the post, a permanent link to the post, a comment link for readers to leave their feedback, and a trackback link.

What makes blogs different from other web sites?

There are a few important ways blogs differ from regular web pages.

First, blogs are designed to be frequently and easily updated. Creating a new blog post usually involves nothing more than entering some text into a form and clicking Submit. No HTML or programmememing skills are required. A regularly updated blog can help your site get crawled by search engines more often. If a search engine finds that your page is being updated every day, it’ll be more likely to reindex that page frequently to ensure that it always has the most recent copy.

The second important way that blogs differ from normal web pages is that they actively promote and distribute themselves throughout the Internet using a technology called RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (It can also mean Rich Site Summary, depending on which version you’re talking about).

A blog is also a type of content management system (CMS) that makes it easy for any business owner to publish and make great hubs for your other social media marketing efforts, as they can be integrated with nearly every other tool and platform.

Every business with a website should have a blog that speaks to its current and potential customers as real people and should be conversational in nature.

Blogs can be set up on a variety of platforms – Hosted Versus Self-Hosted

Hosted software resides on a server owned by the organisation that maintains the site. Many hosted solutions will give you a URL to use, such as http://.wordpress.com.

Self-hosted software is run on your own server. Self-hosted platforms require installation and configuration, but once they are set up they’re completely under your control. Blogs running self-hosted software are located on a domain owned solely by you, as opposed to the shared domains often used by hosted blogs.

Hosted software is often easier for new bloggers to get started on, but for best results your blog should appear on your own domain. Some hosted blog systems allow you to use your own domain; take advantage of this if you can. Most popular blogs today use self-hosted software, and chances are good that you’ll need help installing, designing, configuring, and maintaining your blog to get it running to your needs.

WordPress

WordPress is the most well-known and widely used blogging software, as well as our personal favorite. It is free, is open source, and has a robust community of developers and designers who’ve built thousands of plug-ins and themes for it, making it the most customizable platform available. Once WordPress is installed and set up, it is also one of the easiest to use. Infact WordPress is now being widely used as the content management system for full websites (such as this website where the blog is integrated into the main website). Wordpress.com also offers a hosted version of WordPress software that can be used for free.

Blogger

One of the earliest blogging platforms, Blogger is hosted software owned by Google and most sites using it appear on URLs such as http://.blogspot.com. It is very easy to use, but it lacks many of the features available in other platform solutions. It is a popular choice for new bloggers creating their first sites.

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