Integrating your Blog into your website

Posted by Natasha D'Souza on Nov 4, 2009 in Blog, social media 101, Wordpress | 0 comments

There are many ways to get up and running with a blog, the most common way and easiest is to use a free blogging site like eBlogger, Typepad, WordPress and Livejournal. Of course this goes without saying that there are many more sites like this.

Advantages of these sites

These sites are free.

Easy to setup and require no technical knowledge.

Great way to start blogging and discover you online voice.

Perfect for a personal blog, website about events, informal organizations etc…

Disadvantages of these sites are

Offer limited selection of templates.

Templates have limited capabilities

Minimal customization.

No corporate branding.

So if you are just exploring I would say this is the best way to go. I you are a small organization then you can pay the fee and get a custom URL. However if you are an established brand or even an up and coming one then I strongly suggest that you invest in doing this correctly.

Getting a blog up on your website

A number of the free blogging services also offer you an option to upload their cms systems onto your site. I will focus on WordPress in this case.

Go to WordPress.org and download the latest version of their software. Remember it’s free.

Unzip this file.

FTP these files to the server that hosts your current website.

Activate the template that you like.

You can find free or paid templates that can be modified for your use.

Add a Blog tab to your existing site and you are almost there.

Website integration

Now comes the website integration. This is the process of taking your existing website and the WordPress site and making it look the same to the user!!!  This takes a fair bit of technical skills to achieve this.

So ask your person in your company responsible for the website to do this. If you don’t have some internally then fear not as Virtual EyeSee is a full service social media agency and we offer services to do this website integration.

This seems to be quite a bit of work and effort in getting this right so why bother when you can use the free sites out there?

Advantages of integrating your blog into your website?

The first thing is the consistency in your branding both online and of line. This means that when users come to your site what is happening in the background is irrelevant to them, it should appear as one site.

The google juice is important as well i.e. search engine optimization. So one of the factors to having a high ranking is changing content on your website. Each blog post is equivalent to a page and it’s the easiest way to achieve this.

The blog gives potential customers updates, a more personal perspective on your business, or expertise in your industry etc..

Most of all ease of navigation.