I wish more business people would take a chance at using some of these awesome tools that are largely free except for the time involved to set things up and adding posts to keep them fresh.

We’ve practically skipped a few key steps in the process of getting our businesses online due to the rapidly advancing technology.

I’m still finding businesses (once they have finally decided that the internet is here to stay) go out and hire an expensive website designer that ends up doing less than nothing in terms of attracting and maintaining customers.

So they end up with an expensive “billboard in the desert” that costs them money instead of actually helping to make them money as they help their customers.

Hopefully the word is getting out in more ways that even beginners can start to understand the benefits and the simplicity of these amazing tools.

Thanks for helping to inform.

Rick

But if he hadn’t built any site to begin with, I’d definitely steer him toward using a hosted CMS like Wordpress.com to build his site.

I’ll do a followup post to explain more what I mean by “integrate” — at least well enough to tell them what to ask the web designer for.

- Amy

Oh, and: If your web designers say they can’t easily add a blog to your site, they’re wrong. You can create a blog using a free service like Wordpress.com and integrate that into any site. Once it’s set up, then you just keep posting to it.

I agree that that a competent person who knows how to create websites should be able to easily “integrate” weblog functionality into a site, and also that WordPress.com is a great service. However, two points:

First, I advocate for using a CMS (and of course we don’t have to call it that, it can just be “WordPress” or “MovableType”) regardless of the use of “weblog” (which is just a list of posts). I just wanted to point that out, since the line assumes “integration”, which really shouldn’t be happening, rather, it should be the default setup.

Second, “you can create a blog using a free service like Wordpress.com and integrate that into any site” seems to me to be massaging the truth, on a technical level. Of course it depends on what you mean by integration, but the people these tips are aimed at may talk to their web tech with expectations that are difficult to articulate.

WordPress.com has hosting options, which if I were do a no-nonsense fully-service-hosted setup, I could suggest WP.com as the web host and maybe Gmail as the mail host. However, WP.com also has (understandable) restrictions on theming and other kinks to be worked out before it can be integrated with any site. ^_^