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It seems a good habit these days to have a blog. It gets really close to a Content Management System, it has incorporated feeds, it’s got blogrolls, and… it’s a trend. I remember the days when CMSs started to take over manually-crafted static web sites. It was a real war. Everyone had a CMS web site, even a small one. With built-in search system, breadcrumbs, no HTML knowledge required, maybe some CSS for styling, and more.
Well, blogs are better, in my opinion. Yes, even for a corporate site. Add new pages for your services, products and testimonials, and turn the blogging engine into a news engine, or a changelog for one of your products. Turn the comments off, pick one of the thousand templates available on the Internet, brand it, and you’ve got a fresh new corporate site.
Advantages:
* You have RSS (RSS2, and maybe Atom) built-in,
* You can enhance it with plugins (SEO, spam, feedback, social bookmarking, and more),
* Change the theme next year in less than a minute,
* Very easy to maintain and update,
* Concentrate more on promoting and optimizing the web site,
* Have a Blogroll (or Affiliates, or Partners),
* Have a blog, a corporate blog, a business blog (it’s a blog engine in the first place, isn’t it?).
Disadvantages:
* You might have to fire your programmers and hire more SEO,
* You don’t have so much control over the source code (do you really need to?).
And that’s about it. Try and find more pros and cons of this blog ascendency on corporate sites. Try and imagine Microsoft.com running on WordPress. A black and blue theme, Microsoft branded and customized, with Vista ads everywhere. It’s nice, isn’t it? And they might have a chance to lose those .asp and .aspx pages.
Or imagine Adobe.com running on WordPress (I am a WordPress fan). They’d have to work a little on that 2-level top menu, but that’s all. With a little CSS and HTML knowledge, you might turn a regular blog into a 10 star (out of 10) corporate web site. And you wouldn’t have to worry about creating tens of pages for your products and services, or developing a full-option database. No. It’s already there. Just pick a blog engine. And install it.
And then launch it with “Butterfly Media Romania Corporate Sites adopts WordPress as a platform for their next generation web site”. You can even add a “NOW IN BETA” badge, so you can add or remove stuff while the site is online. It’s cool to be BETA! But that’s another article, some other day.
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