newmediaMike

Professional Blogs on “free” blog sites

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Earlier this month I received an RFQ to create a new e-commerce site for a client. One of the provisions was we were to integrate their Blogspot (Blogger) blog into the new site - “as is” with the very unprofessional looking headers, graphics etc. Now don’t get me wrong, I experimented with Blogger a few years ago and it was OK for my personal rants at the time, and yes I did have a WordPress hosted blog last year, but a self hosted blog makes so much more sense!

First with a self hosted blog you get to use the awesome WordPress platform which allows for a great deal more latitude in designing and also implementing SEO.

I strongly recommend setting up a subdomain and placing the blog on the subdomain like I did when I set up a blog for videozine,  blog.videozine.ca this way you can still capitalize on your domain name and whatever brand recognition it may have.

I had to inform the client we could extrapolate the posts but the headers, layout, etc were not importable. I strongly recommended they consider placing a WordPress blog on their site and we would keep the posts, but we would create a new look for the blog to be more in keeping with the overall sites look, in essence staying on brand.

My bottom line on this - it’s OK to experiment with a company blog - hell you SHOULD have a company blog, but don’t put it out in the public, keep your name intact.