[UPHPU] Best way to incorporate blog into web site

[Wade Preston Shearer]

On 6 Oct 2008, at 19:58, MilesTogoe wrote:

> okay, we really want to have a company blog as part of our website  
> and looking for advice as to the best way to do it.  I guess there  
> are options:

I like having a blog skinned differently from the main company  
website. Blogs are different beasts and do not fit into the same skin  
as the corporate/public/marketing website. And, if they are skinned  
differently, it makes sense that they are not part of the site  
hierarchy. It is fairly common to put them on a sub-domain (adobe) or  
a separate domain (Dell), such as blogs.example.com. That's what  
adobe, google, and the like do. You can (should) still link to it from  
the main site (and back) however.

Whatever you do, I would recommend WordPress. It is very skinnable,  
flexible, has a great community, tons of plugins, and has a great API  
for writing custom plugins. I would recommend against writing your  
own; there isn't much point with the software that already exists.


> 1) build the website around the blog (ie use something like  
> wordpress and have the blog dominate - a la tompeters.com

This depends entirely on the type of business that you have. Tom  
Peters is a consultant company. Please come to them for information.  
They are trying to be a thought leader. Information is their product,  
so a blog on their home page makes good sense. If you are GAP or  
BestBuy, it does not.


> 2) insert the blog into the web page (not really sure how to do this)

I wouldn't recommend this as it would require you to write your own  
system or customize one significantly. I don't see the value. I also  
believe blogs should have a different interface as stated above.


> 3) have blog on separate linked page and use blog software or  
> service (wordpress, blogspot)

Yes.


> 4) build own blog as a separate page on the site using php or rails  
> or python - this seems like what 37signals is doing with their  
> signals vs noise blog (one of my favorites)

I would not build my own, but yes, putting the blog on it's own sub  
domain or sub directory is wise:

http://productblog.37signals.com/
http://www.37signals.com/svn/


At Omniture, we have our corporate/marketing site…

http://omniture.com


…and our corporate blog…

http://blogs.omniture.com/


It is running WordPress with a custom skin and several custom plug- 
ins. We also have a page on our website about the blog that gives  
people teasers and pulls them into the blog…

http://www.omniture.com/en/resources/blogs


…which is dynamically pulling from the WordPress database.
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