This is part 3 of the topic on blog-type sites.

Read Part 1 about Sites powered by Wordpress and Part 2: how easy it is to create blog-type sites.

As an illustration of how you could use a blog as a site, consider a gym business.

Many gyms have websites but they can provide little service over the web, except to provide information about what is happening in the gym, where all the interesting activities occur. So the website would exist to provide information to members and potential members and a traditional site could do that very well with a page for contact details, and services separated into different categories, etc. The site could even allow existing members to renew their membership online.

Interactive site

How about using a blog-style site to run it instead? Create permanent pages for information such as contact details, prices and services. Write posts as updates when for example a new aerobic class is launched, new weight machines introduced, promotions launched. These will appear on the first page at the top and will invite people to visit the site more regularly as they see fresh news often. The blog-style site will also allow members to interact by posting comments. Potential customers could also post their questions in the form of comments. To take the idea of blog even further, guest posts could be written by different training experts which could be interesting to members and non-members alike.

New interactive informative sites are much more interesting. As it is so easy to get such a site up and running, hopefully we should see more and more such sites.

Shame Blogspot is nowhere that flexible. There are templates there that would alter the look of the blog but there are no plugins and you cannot download and install the software on your own server, you have less control over it.

This is Part 2 of sites powered by Wordpress.

It is easy to understand how these so-called new blog-style sites came about. Wordpress is the dominant blog software and is free and highly flexible. You don’t need a single penny to get such a site launched. Your domain name can be a sub-domain of Wordpress so you won’t even have to buy one; the blog will be powered by Wordpress of course and the hosting provided by it. You just have to provide content.  All these free options are available at Wordpress.com. However, your blog will be just that – a blog.

Wordpress features

There are certain restrictions when using Wordpress.com. By hosting the Wordpress software on your own server, you get extra flexibility with plugins and can choose any theme beyond those provided by Wordpress itself. The Wordpress theme not only determines the look of your site but also its functionalities and SEO capability. Many Wordpress themes look less and less like blogs and more and more like conventional websites with their categories in the horizontal bar, drop-down menus and so on.

Blogs nowadays are so powerful they are able to act as a substitute to more conventional websites as we know them, not just because of their look as discussed above but also in terms of their functionalities. The Wordpress free software and themes together come with a large number of plugins, in-built RSS feeds, let you add fixed pages, the latest in on-page SEO and will also ping or notify syndicating sites and blog search engines when a new post is added.

Blog adoption by many

There are now many businesses that have adopted this approach, especially those that do not sell products or services online in the strict sense of ecommerce and online delivery. Instead of a more conventional site, they publish a blog which looks nothing like one. It is their window on the web for advertising their products and services at next to no cost. A few examples are swamp.co.uk and mytravelcorner.co.uk. By interacting with visitors, sites like these are even able to improve their conversion rates.

In the past, to create your own site, you would have enlisted the help of a web designer at considerable cost. Later came off-the shelf sites but they were still expensive. Today, with free Wordpress themes and free Wordpress software, all you need is a host and a domain name and you are ready to fill in your site with content whilst keeping it fully yours and retaining flexibility.

There seems to be a proliferation of sites driven by Wordpress. While traditionally, such sites were blogs, and still are in a strict sense, the newer sites are mostly informative or even provide a service with the added possibility of commenting on the articles.

Static web pages

Many of us will remember the good old days of the web when a static html page will be displayed with text content on it for everyone to read. The flow of information was one way and there was no interaction with the reader. There were still groups and forums as places to interact with other users but these would be away from the content page.

Then emerged the web 2.0 era which is all about this interaction with the reader.

Interaction with readers

Sites interacting with users came in many forms and the most obvious are the social networking sites and blogs.

Newspaper websites are a good example of this evolution. A few years ago, the Daily Mail allowed users to post comments at the bottom of their articles. More recently, they allowed any reader to vote for the comments. Readers now have the ability to read not only the main news article but just as interestingly, read the comments posted, sort them in order of popularity, add their own comments and vote. The comments enable a reader to find out aboutother readers’ opinions and with the voting system, to judge the mood and opinions of readers in general.

Looks like a blog but isn’t

There now seems to be the emergence of a new kind of website which assumes the functionalities of a blog without quite being one with http://greenstem.org.uk/ as an example. A blog, contraction for web diary, started out as individuals posting their opinions and updates on certain topics, often from a personal point of view.

These newer emerging sites provide information, the way static html pages used to but with the ability for readers to post their comments blog-style.

Find out how easy it is to set up blog-style sites.

I recently stumbled across an old blog post detailing how SEO experts were handing out wrong advice regarding Wordpress permalinks.

Usual SEO-friendly URL

The conventional practice is to write an SEO-friendly URL that features your keywords and the structure of the URL would be your category structure. More often than not, the keyword part is simply the post title. We all know about this and most bloggers do it. In blogs, the URL for each blog post is called a permalink, because, well, it is a permanent link!

Arguments against keyword permalinks

In criticising this permalink structure made up of keywords, the main arguments against that was speed and reliability. A convoluted explanation was given, revolving around Wordpress, its database structure and plenty of other technicalities that would result in the server spending a long time to look for a particular post because that post can exist in a number of locations and on very big blog sites, the Wordpress server might even crash. The end result being underimpressed readers who would leave the site because it takes too long to load or crashes down.

Naming and shaming SEO experts

Next in that post was a dedicated part on naming and shaming ‘SEO experts’, including Matt Cutts from Google, who recommended the conventional approach and on how they were all wrong. Followed concrete examples and citations on when they made their so-called wrong recommendations.

But where is SEO in the explanation?

While I am not going to argue whether the argument is correct or not as I am no expert in these technical matters, I will certainly argue against the author’s spin on it. His arguments on speed and reliability have nothing to do with SEO! That’s all there is to it.

He criticises SEO experts about an explanation having nothing to do with search engines. HE was just looking for an excuse to attract attention by naming and criticising big names. SEO is all about bringing traffic in via the search engines. It is not about improving the customer experience, however important and crucial that is. If you want to colour your font yellow on a white background, is this an SEO sin?

As a final note, Wordpress has announced that it has solved the technical issue that caused SEO-friendly permalinks to slow down a site.