[X-Newbies] Blog and Wiki newbie.

[Tony Johansen]

On 15/1/2007 8:08 AM, "Brian Durant" <globetrotterdk at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would like to setup some sort of blog or wiki, preferably on one of
> my own domains, but I need some advice, links, HowTo, books at Amazon,
> etc. to figure out what and how to create one. I would like to create
> one in connection with a business I am starting, so it needs to look
> nice enough not to scare customers away ;-)

There is a vast difference between blog and wiki. So first you need to
decide which to go for. Blogs well done are fine for most circumstances and
are easier so I would advise blog. Wiki you would use if you really need
significant customer interaction on the site.

2nd: free or pay? Like with anything you get what you pay for. Blogger.com
is free for example and a lot of people like them. Personally I find them
too limited and their templates are the most boring on the planet.
I use    http://www.typepad.com/    It has the balance between powerful,
flexible, looks great, value, etc that suits me. And they have excellent
online manual resources that makes everything simple, yet you can easily add
photo albums, widgets etc.

A third choice open to you if you run Tiger, is to make sure you have
Apple's iWeb and use that. It is designed to be easiest to use with a .Mac
account, but there are ways of getting it onto your own hosted web space.
Iweb demo's I have seen show it to be easy to use and looks cool.

With all of these it is best for business to have the blog on your own
domain name because the web address can be simpler and easier for your
customers to use. TypePad makes that process relatively easy to do, and are
helpful at every step incidentally. I have not used iWeb myself, so can't
comment on their helpfulness, nor the flexibility of the programme.

Blogs work well, but I find a static web site works better on the web in
terms of the search engines. An ideal world is to have a static web site
with an embedded blog that takes care of news, specials, etc

You may care to look at one of my (too many) TypePad blogs here:
                   http://www.christmas.blogs.com

Have fun :-) Tony