April 23rd, 2008

If you’ve even remotely heard of this latest technological innovation called “the internet”, it’s all but certain you’ve likewise already come to understand the benefit of the blog. See, whatever it is you do all day, you write about, others get to read about it, and by an economy of scale, some of them will consider you an expert. Pretty slick, assuming you actually know what you’re doing.

You have two basic options:

Go through the trouble of setting up your own blog or use a blogging service like the one offered to select buyers over at ITPWS.com. Do it on your own, and establish your own voice, but if you can’t be bothered to invent the mastery of the writing craft, maybe you should consider having it done for you, assuming, again, that you have a business that actually has a product to sell.

If you’re striking out on your own with a blog, and have all the inclination and none of the disposable income, the very best solution (according to every member of our staff, who have collectively launched almost a thousand sites) is WordPress.

You can download a full-featured version to put on your site for free (if your host doesn’t already offer it automatically) or use a scaled-back version on their site. It’s pretty good, interactive, and unless you want it to look like a seamless part of your own site, it should do the trick just about perfectly.

There are other sites with content management systems you might be interested in, such as PHPNuke, PostNuke or Drupal. Each of these are a bit more advanced than you’d need for a blog (and by “a bit” I really mean “a lot”), but if you’ve got the coding prowess or a developer handy to build them out, you can use these base installations to afford greater upside potential in the future. Of course, your native CMS should have that functionality, and WordPress can be configured (even if against its will) to do just about anything you can dream up.

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