The flexibility of blog software
Wed, 25 January, 2006 – 8:42 pm
I've just returned from another business trip down in Cardiff at the company I contract for. Since working there for over 18 months now I'm lucky to be in a position whereby they trust my opinions and judgement. Their websites indirectly bring them in a lot of money and since I've been working for them they've cut their marketing budget down a great deal. We're currently working on a new design for the site and also to amalgamate all departments onto one domain. Currently several web sites on one IP means that Google pays attention to the main web site but pretty much ignores the rest, so this way I'm hoping to increase the visitors further.
The current sites have a news section which is updated every so often. The new site will have wordpress integrated into it to run the news section. This will provide an easier set up to add news stories for the person concerned. It will also mean all new news stories will be indexed by sites such as Technorati and Google Blogsearch, which has a much quicker indexing system (around 15-30 minutes upwards depending on the engine). My 'sales pitch' to the company was also to point out that it is news which is almost instantly findable. They go to a lot of events in and around Cardiff and Swansea, so if they've published their account of the event in the same day they could be pulling in the visitors already searching on that before the local newspapers get their writeups out or the run of the mill sites get their pages indexed by the usual methods.
I've also sold them the idea of using an RSS feed on their vacancies page (it's a recruitment company) which is essentially their product. Vacancies constantly going online and could be filled within a day or two, but those pages do not get indexed by the search engines until usually at least 48 hours later. Of course vacancies being filled within that time is great, but the idea is also to possibly have new people applying for the job as they would be put into other available positions too. However not everyone has the time to check the site. An email subscription would only go out twice a week really, else it would look a little thin on the ground, whereas an RSS feed means the visitor can stay anonymous compared to email subscriptions, but still keep uptodate with any current vacancies without having to keep checking the web site. It's another idea that looks into the future which I've also sold to a company that sells products that change so very often. These products can be sold within 30 minutes, and the only way their repeat visitors can see the new products is by constantly refreshing the new stock page. Again an RSS feed would mean that they can have almost instant alerts to the new products added within in the past 5, 10, 15 minutes, depending on what their update setting is.
I'm lucky to have clients who are happy to prepare for the future and right now I think these types of methods being used in business sites are definitely going to just improve a site and be one step ahead when the future comes.
Sorry if my posting seems a little unstructured - 2 sleepless nights means I'm shattered!
One Response to “The flexibility of blog software”
the RSS feed sounds like your giving their site a major advantage.
I agree RE blog platforms, they have the abiltity to do so much more.
By Matt on Jan 25, 2006