The Blog...

By Joel Padot
Posted Tuesday, November 30, 2004

I’ve been working on a good many websites recently. The funny thing is that, while none of them have been full scale e-commerce sites, they have all required the ability for the client to change or add his own content while keeping an archive of old information. My solution to the problem is to use a blog? I’m now using blogs constantly on my web site projects.

I first used a blog on a personal blog site (www.sinsofadesigner.com). The goal of this site was to get used to a blog and to write a few articles. My next instance of a blog appeared on my company website using SSI to insert a news feed into the site. This worked great! From then on I was hooked.

I now have a client that is having a blog integrated into his site for a newsletter and a radio show website that will be posting weekly materials on the site through a blog. The possibilities are endless.

As you see with this website (www.joelpadot.com), a blog is used to post articles. I am truly a firm believe in the blog. And as a proponent, I’d like to recommend a few good blog softwares that I believe in.

Blogger (www.blogger.com): I’m not recommending this tool, thought it isn’t bad at all. It’s full of features. It offers pre-designed templates, the ability to create your own, and a huge community of bloggers from all over the world. The big problem I have with it is that you have to go to the Blogger website to edit your blog. However, there is an email post option available.

WordPress(www.wordpress.org): This site uses WordPress. It’s a full featured blog that is accessed from your own server. I like this particular software. The best part is that it is open sourced. This is very convenient. This program has a very solid set of features that I like a lot. It also allows you to put a list of links onto the site from the administrative area and not insert them into the template.

Nucleus (www.nucleuscms.org): I’m working on a client’s website that uses this software. The biggest plus for this software is that the admin area is personalized with the site information. This is really good when using it for a client site. I also like its skinning feature. It allows you to control every aspect of the design. This is good because you can your interior pages can have a different appearance from the main index page. This is my favorite blog software.

For those of you looking for a solution to a content problem, your solution may be no farther away than an open source blog.

About the Author
Joel Padot is the Director of Operations at 3D Solutions for Business, LLC, a business consulting and web development firm dedicated to helping small and medium sized business achieve success in their ever competitive markets. You may visit Joel at (http://www.3dconsultants.net). Joel also maintains a website (www.joelpadot.com) where he posts professional articles and commentaries.