I've been adding quite a few blogs to sites and I'm wondering if it's better to add blogging software on the site or use an external blogging service. The major reason I can think of adding a blog to site is if you want to customize it later on (other than look) such as more integration with the site. If I put it on the site, I'll probably use WordPress as I'm familiar with it.
Is there any major advantage to one method or the other?
I would go with putting the blog on your website itself. This will help with a number of things:
Transparency: Your users will feel as if they are on the same website, because they in fact are. Your blog will become simply an extension to your website. On the other hand, a blogging service will most likely appear as though you are going to a completely different website.
Integration: You are able to integrate everything on your website with your blog. This includes any existing user bases, or future ones. Also, the look of your blog can match your website perfectly, much more so than with a blogging service.
Customization: You get 100% control over every single feature of your blog. If you want some new crazy feature, you can program it. Blogging services are typically much more closed than this.
The downsides will be that you have to maintain it, and any features that you want you have to put in yourself.
One of the advantages of having blog on your site is that all the content will belong to your site, which is good for search engine since it will increase your site visibility through SERP. But you will have the price to pay: installation and maintenance.
It's not cut and dried:
(Assuming this is for clients) do you have an ongoing relationship with the client and time scheduled for upgrades? Most blog software needs at least some upgrading or security patching from time to time.
Are you relying on some sort of social media network effects from these blogs? If so, you may get better mileage from a hosted product as they often promote related sites within their networks (e.g. Wordpress has the "Possibly related posts" feature).
As Brian said, integration could be an issue if you have other areas of your site that rely on logins. In that case, probably better to host it yourself.
Related
I'm not entirely sure how to properly ask this, so please bear with me.
I have an idea for a site I would like to build, which would basically be a site for members to create some data and have it housed in my database. I would like to offer a value-add to the site which would allow people to spin off their own website via my own "website builder" tool (probably some sort of CMS). Their website would be able to communicate with my master database to display their data.
Getting down to the crux of the topic, I'm looking for architectural advice/ideas/etc. regarding what services I could use to do this. I'm not looking a 100% automated solution, but something along these lines (which may not be completely correct, I admit):
Customer puts in an order to create their own site, using my tools.
I setup a separate domain for them, roll out the CMS foundation to the site, and the customer has full editing control of the CMS to design it however they would like.
The CMS would have some customizations so that it includes functionality to call APIs located on the master site, which would return the relevant data.
In the research I have done on SO, I've seen a lot of mentions of Umbraco which honestly looks like a good start. I'm just worried that when I go to upgrade a version, I have to deal with overwriting my custom API functionality. I'm guessing this is the nature of the beast, and requires me to accept/plan for it.
Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Some high-level starting points? Thanks!
I've been thinking about this same issue for my customers.
It is not hard to automatically roll out a stock cms such as Wordpress or Joomla. This sort of thing is done all the time by "1 click installers" that DreamHost and others have.
Including custom widgets or plugins for the CMS that can connect to your main app is also not hard.
For dns, you can use Amazon Route 53 or other DNS services that include a good api at the dns management level.
I suggest that you focus on using a CMS that is very popular (eg Wordpress or Joomla) rather than something less well known such as Umbraco. Using a more popular system will drastically reduce your training costs--remember that if you supply the CMS to your customers, then they'll also expect you to supply the support for it...
I need a intranet portal for a Repair factory in which 100 Technician worked.
The main purpose of this portal is "sharing technical information (like technical bulletins etc)".
I also create a simple website/portal with HTML,Javascript. Which is running sucessfully.
But Now we need a Blog like site in which Technician can share own experience/knowledge with other. for this requirement i tried with Joomla,wordpress, drupal etc.
firstly suggest me which platform is best? i have beginning knowledge of PHP, JavaScript and JQuery.
requirement:
Technician can post a article within one or more defined categaries.(like model,level of information,Electrical or mechnical etc.)
After submitting articles, it sent to the Technical Specialist or Technical Editor for approval.
after approved it is published to Blog with ranting,commenting option.
Which theme,plug-in is suitable?
Take a look at Plone (http://plone.org/), I think it fits perfectly for your needs.
Plone lets non-technical people create
and maintain information for a public
website or an intranet using only a
web browser. Plone is easy to
understand and use — allowing users to
be productive in just half an
hour — yet offers a wealth of
community-developed add-ons and
extensibility to keep meeting your
needs for years to come. "
For those looking these days and who want / need WordPress you can use Woffice (https://woffice.io/) or Thrive. Both have all these features.
I work at a more traditional ad agency and I am the sole web guy here. Recently a designer here redesigned our website based on the popular blog style seen about on the internets at the moment. Design is similar to this blog: http://effektiveblog.com/
I put forward that this would be a WordPress job, due to the designed features (tag cloud, dated/categorized posts, ability to be updated, rss, etc)
However, the non-web people at my workplace are saying they don't want to "do WordPress" and are planning on out-sourcing a custom CMS for this blog-look-a-like site!
As you can imagine, this is very frustrating and back-to-front.
However, as I haven't really delved fully into WordPress enough I don't fully know what arguments to put forward in regards to advantages/disadvantages in building it with WordPress vs a custom CMS.
Any thoughts on what to suggest to non-web superiors? or links even pointing to similar discussions?
I've been in the WordPress world for a few years and my observations have been that most of the "WordPress vs. other CMS" arguments boil down to a couple things:
Ultimately, you could use WordPress for nearly any CMS task, and you could use a general CMS to build blog content
WordPress was designed primarily as a blogging platform, so that's where it really shines. Yes, it can be used for other CMS tasks, but it does blogging best and that's where you'll find the most support and robust features.
More general CMS systems will offer features designed for a variety of content (not just blog posts or static pages), but they won't offer as many features (or as easy of an experience) for the blogging component as WordPress will.
Generally I tell folks that if the focus of the site is frequently updated content that is managed in a chronological fashion (like a blog), go with WordPress. If they're looking to integrate a bunch of disparate content and blogging isn't really important, they'll probably be better served by a more general CMS.
Wordpress is great for blogs and mid size simple websites. It's "static pages" approach is really useful, because you can create hirarchies that are fully editable from admin panel. It's plugin ecosystem is very good also - from SEO to automatic backups.
When I needed to convince some people that Wordpress would be a good idea to a CMS solution (not just a blog one), I created a prototype, and said that I just needed to edit a few php files (all copied from the default template), a few administration tasks and a few plugins and I was all set.
This prototype was really simple: no design, just structure. I made it in a saturday afternoon, and I made a challenge to everyone involved if they could create the same structure I created, with a full admin interface, in less time. No one could. And it's a tested plataform, yes, it's not "all MVC based", but it works and its administration is great to use.
I don't know if you have time to do it, but since is really fast to do it, I'd rather show them instead of just saying it.
One disadvantage of Wordpress is its performance. You may need to look at some cache plugins for your installation, like WpSuperCache. And be warned that if your website, in a long run, is going to have a lot of different requirements, Wordpress may not be the ideal solution.
WordPress is definitely the world's most popular CMS. The script is in its roots more of a blog than a typical CMS. For a while now it's been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like.
Advantages -
Easy to operate-
WordPress does not require PHP nor HTML knowledge unlinke Drupal, Joomla or Typo3. A preinstalled plugin and template function allows them to be installed very easily. All you need to do is to choose a plugin or a template and click on it to install.
It's good choice for beginners.
Community-
To have a useful support, there must be a large community of users, who will be a part of e.g. a discussion board.
Plugins-
The script has over dozen thousand of plugins available on its website. They are the reason WordPress is considered a CMS, not only a blogging script. Strong majority of the plugins is available for free.
Templates-
On the scritp's homepage you can view thousands of graphics templates, that can change your website's look. You can find there both free and paid templates. The paid ones are often more advanced as well as more interesting.
Menu management-
WordPress menu management has extended functionalities, that can be modified to include categories, pages, etc.
E-commerce is available on WordPress
At Designed to Connect, we generally use Woocommerce – an e-commerce add on to WordPress to build our e-commerce websites. As an e-commerce store, you will often find yourself updating your products, pricing, sales, coupons and more. Woocommerce is extremely effective in doing all this along with offering great reports features.
Disadvantages -
WordPress updates their software frequently-
WordPress is constantly changing and growing and it needs regular updates. This is not a big deal unless you are looking for a set-it-and-forget-it solution, in which case this might not be the solution for you as it needs periodic updates.
Customization of a theme can be costly-
If the website was built upon a theme and you decide that you want to make major changes to it, it may be time-consuming to have a programmer make changes to the layout of the theme. If you anticipate needing to make major changes to the theme, consider having a theme built from scratch to meet your needs instead.
Advantages:
Low cost to upkeep / maintain website is cheap
Easy and good with usability on back-end
Tons of plugins (which can slow your site down significantly)
Write your own functions if you know PHP.
codex.wordpress.org, the documentation is so easy
Tons of updates for security
The community, the millions of users
SEO possibilities (when compared to other famous CMS)
Can make a big corporate to small website
Disadvantages:
Not the the most optimum use of its resources (but its getting better every update)
Security (also improving)
Advantages:
Simple
Huge number of themes and plugins
SEO
Easily convert site to Ecommerce
Disadvantages
Customization
Source: Advantages and disadvantages of wordpress
Is there any SEO disadvantage in using a subdomain to host a blog on Wordpress or Blogger? I don't want to go to the trouble of creating a blog module for my site - I'd rather just set up a CNAME entry and point a subdomain to a free Wordpress or Blogger account. Will Google punish me for doing this by claiming that I have "duplicate content" - i.e. the intro text for each blog entry will be on my main site and the full details will be visible on Wordpress/Blogger? Is it better to incorporate the blog functionality into my main site? Are there any other potential disadvantages to this subdomain/external hosting approach using a free blog host?
There are a lot of advantages to self-hosting your blog.
You can do whatever you want with your own self-hosted blog. On Wordpress you could get banned and lose all of your content.
You can host ads or and do other commercial stuff not possible on Wordpress. (The free wordpress blog doesn't allow any advertisements other than their own ads).
Better ranking opportunity in search engines by using your own top-level domain.
You can modify your functionality at will.
It looks more professional and gives you bragging rights.
On Wordpress you may run up against bandwidth restrictions if your blog gets really popular - you won't be able to do anything about it.
Willem Obst answer makes some excellent points, but two serious accusations that are not correct. I know these are incorrect because I am part of the WordPress.com team.
Num 1. If there is a ToS issue, we work with our customers to resolve the issue. In the rare case, where a blog is suspended, the customer is still assisted with exporting their content.
Num 6.We have no bandwidth limits and never have.
Many companies use free WordPress.com for their blog. Here are some examples
http://wordpress.org/showcase/flavor/wordpresscom/
WordPress.com is also is a blogging community which gives you access to a large audience and the community features like the global tag pages.
It's a great way to get a blog going, and there is no lock in. Here is an example of a blog by some friends that started on WordPress.com and since moved to host it themselves to gain the additional flexibility Willem describes so well:
http://blog.bootuplabs.com/
Finally to the original question. It's a mixed bag.
The nay sayers to using a subdomain will focus on Google and other search engines generally treating the subdomain as it's own domain with it's own authority.
The pro subdomainers will focus on it being another opportunity for a result in Google and the search engines. As is the case for the "bootup labs" example. (Although, Google's Matt Cutts over a year ago promised this was changing.)
Unrelated to SEO, many teams use a subdomain or separate domain all together for web security reasons. You may notice that http://blog.flickr.net/ is on flickr.net instead of flickr.com primarily -- I understand -- for this reason.
No in one word
Actually a good idea. Self hosted blogs tend to have a lot integrated into them e.g autopinging
In answer to the question.... NO.
The question you asked is also a little ambiguous. Are you wanting to host your own blog ie run it on your own server under a subdomain, or are you wanting to add a CNAME entry that links to your blog.
There are benefits to both:
Running your own - Advantages:
You can control every aspect of it
You can change the design/layout as much as your coding ability can handle
If you have a fast server, your blog will be served to viewers extremely well
You can advertise on your own blog - Google Adwords/Adsense etc...
You can setup advanced analysis of traffic and see every little detail about everyone who visits your blog
You can tweak the SEO of your blog to the 'n'th degree
Running your own - Disdvantages:
Hosting a blog (especially a popular one) requires a pretty powerful web server
You have to maintain the blog and security of the blog eg. users and permissions
Dedicated Server hosting can be expensive
Hosting blogs use a lot of bandwidth
Using a third party blog - Advantages:
Generally free
No strain on your server/bandwidth
Security and permissions management is limited but managed by the host
Generally hosted blogs have an extremely user-friendly GUI
Using a third party blog - Disvantages:
Sometimes include advertising that benefits the host not your company/blog
Very limited ability to customise/edit the design of the blog
Limited control over the security and user management
Other hosts can choose to stop offering a blog hosting service
In regards to SEO and blogs:
Your blog is not going to suffer or be penalised by GOogle/Yahoo/Other search engines if you use a CNAME redirection to another host.
You will not get penalised by a search engine for duplicate content if the content is not completely duplicated on, for example if your main domain uses the title and summary of what is on your blog hosted on the subdomain.
If you adhere to the main SEO principles there is no reason why your blog would suffer on a subdomain:
Using relevant addressing methods eg. yourblog.yourdomain.com/title-of-blog-article.html
Use W3C compliant/correct XHTML/HTML/CSS code
Use appropriate and relevant META data (keywords, descriptions, titles) for the blog and the articles.
Relative linking instead of absolute linking
Hope this helped. If you have any other questions feel free to ask
I'm an administrator of 10-20 separate WordPress blogs, and it's a big pain for me to login to all of them separately. Is there some sort of interface that allows me to do a single-sign-on administration of all of them, like there is under a WordPress MU umbrella?
If so, what's it called? I don't even know the term I'd use to search for this.
I've yet to try it, but Virtual Multiblog might solve your problem.
Or, try the search term:
wordpress + multi blog
Google tends to vary results depending on your country of origin, so I'm not sure that what I found is what you'd find.
If it's just managing posts & pages and a few other items, a blogging client might be the way to go. WordPress provides a good starter list of programs - http://codex.wordpress.org/Weblog_Client
I've heard a lot of good things about http://managewp.com/
However I believe WordPress is implementing some sort of multi-blog support system in the next version release, so you may want to wait until that drops before laying out some cash for a service like ManageWP.