The Pros and Cons of Using an Online Blog Software or a Content Management System (CMS) by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com
I maintain a “play” site with a blog elsewhere. The blog currently uses WordPress for its blog software. This article documents my joys and frustrations in using a third party online blog software to maintain the website. The points mentioned below are not specific to WordPress, and apply whether you are using a blog script or a content management system (CMS).
Advantages of Using an Online Blog Software
1. It Allows You to Focus on the Content
Posting an article is almost effortless. Compared to adding an article to thesitewizard.com, using an online blog software to post articles is like a dream come true. I only need to concentrate on the content of the article. The blog software automatically takes care of modifying the main page to include a snippet of the article and putting links to that
article on the main, archive, category and tag pages.
You are essentially freed from the mundane nitty-gritty of adding articles, to doing the stuff that only you can do - writing content.
2. Automatic Generation of Site Usability Features
Unlike an offline web editor, where everything you want done on your site has to be added manually, blogging and CMS software handle things like tagging, categories and a managing a search engine for you. Simply tag your post as having a
certain keyword, and a new index page is automatically generated for you with a list of posts that have that particular tag.
There’s no need to contemplate whether it is worth the effort and time to create a new page for that particular keyword or tag. The software does it for you. Your visitors automatically have the option, if they wish, to check out all the other articles having the same tag or keyword.
Likewise, adding a search engine to your website is no longer a hassle. In fact, the few popular blog software that I have tried automatically add a search engine for you whether you want it or not.
The blogging software automatically increases the usability of your website without adding complexity to your job as a webmaster.
3.Creation of a Community
If you use a blogging software, your visitors will be able to give their comments and interact with each other under each article you write. For some people, this is a significant advantage, since you can create a community of people around your site who will revisit your site regularly for updates. This loyal following also helps to break your site’s dependence on search engines to send traffic.
4.Ease of Site Redesign
Unless your site is maintained using a sophisticated site manager like Dreamweaver’s template system, or you dump all design elements of your web pages into server side includes, updating the design of your website is usually not a trivial operation. Even if you have a good search and replace utility, you still have to manually fix a lot of things if the
individual pages on your site have some customized design elements.
Updating the site design when using a blog script or a CMS usually involves modifying the theme using the online software. Once you’re done, all the pages on your website automatically reflect the changes.
The Disadvantages of Using Online Blog or CMS Software
1.Potential Security Risks through the Online Scripts
While it’s true that there are security risks in any type of website, having an online blog or CMS software installed on your site increases that risk. Such software are often complicated beasts with many modules performing different tasks. It is always possible that there is a security hole somewhere that the developer was not aware of. Since the software is on your website, open to the public, anyone who discovers a hole before the software developers fixes it can compromise your website and its data.
The risk increases if you are not up-to-date in upgrading your blog or CMS software.
2. The Inconvenient Timing of Upgrades
In general, upgrades can be a colossal pain in the neck. Online blog software developers release upgrades every now and then to fix security holes and other bugs. As mentioned above, for the blogger or CMS user, there is really no option other than to upgrade, otherwise your site can be easily compromised. Unfortunately, such security upgrades don’t always happen at convenient times. Nonetheless, when they are released, it’s in your best interest to apply them whether you are free or not.
It would be great if upgrading were easy. For the most part it is, particularly updates that contain only security fixes. Sometimes, however, an upgrade involves a modification to the theme files which control the website’s design. Such modifications may or may not involve adding new features supported by the newer version of the blogging software. If you are
anything like me, chances are that you would have customized the theme files so as to make them more search engine friendly.
If you want your site to incorporate the new features, you will have to manually go through all the updated theme files to modify them to include your changes. Since you can never be sure whether an update to the theme impacts your site, you always have to perform this check on every upgrade.
The difference between such a situation and the normal one when you want to change your site design is that the latter takes place at a time you decide. Upgrades force you to take time out of your normal schedule to attend to things like this.
3.Unusable Site During Upgrades
While you are uploading the files to your website during an upgrade of the blog or CMS software, your site is basically unusable. If the updated software requires changes to the database, you have to run an upgrade script after uploading the new version of the software before your site will load correctly. Since upload speeds tend to be slow for most ISPs today, there is a large window of time, from the time you start uploading to the time you run the upgrade script to finalize the upgrade, where your website is unusable. If your site is a busy one, there will definitely be a period where the visitors reaching your site get a garbled or unusable site.
4.The Need to Deal with Comment Spam in Blogs
User comments on blogs can be a boon to your site as well as a hassle. It’s great when genuine visitors leave their comments on your site, whether positive or negative. At least you know how people are reacting to your articles. But along with these legitimate visitors come bots and other webmasters that spam your blog with advertisements for their sites that, far from adding value, decrease the quality of your web page. Of course you can delete such comments. But this takes up your time. On certain blogs, the signal to noise ratio have become so low that the webmasters are forced to disable comments to cope, thus negating one of the advantages of using a blog software to create a community.
5.Mistakes are Immediately “Live”
When you redesign your website with the blogging or CMS software, you are redesigning it “live” on your site. Any mistake you make is instantaneously reflected across your site. With an offline web editor, you can preview your site with a browser to make sure it looks the way you intend before you release it to your visitors.
6.Limitations of the Software
In general, you also have to work within the limitations of the software. If your software does not have a particular feature that you want, you will not be able to have that facility on your site until the developers of the script implement it.
7.The Software Uses More Resources on Your Web Server
CMS and blogging software use more CPU, RAM and other resources on your web server. The software has to construct each page every time a visitor loads it, taking up valuable computational resources. On a high traffic day, not only will your site appear slow, it may also slow down all the other websites hosted on the same web server. If you are hosted on a shared web hosting plan, this often brings down a notice from your web host that you have exceeded the resource limits on the server, resulting in their recommending that you upgrade to a dedicated server.
http://www.thesitewizard.com/general/blogging-pros-and-cons.shtml
March 28 2008 | SEM | No Comments »
Among the traditional methods of advertising, the fastest growing way is internet advertising. PPC advertising is one of the most popular method of internet advertising. It is effective, cost effective, proven and affordable to every pocket. If you are desperate and frustrated with failures using PPC advertising, you must know that every successful marketer has his own share of failures. PPC advertising has the advantage of speed as the result comes almost instantly. It is ideal for generating leads, you can track the performance and can improve the campaigns by tweaking.
If you have a high CTR which is the percentage of clicks with the number of impressions, it will automatically reduce cost per click (CPC) in case of Google Adwords and if you have a good product to offer, you can get a high return on investment (ROI). It is desirable that you have a really good useful product to offer and the landing page is able to generate interest in the product. Normally PPC is used for generating leads and making visitors know about the product. The visitors may return back later to consider your product.
You need to build, customize and manage campaigns, however you must first read about PPC advertising otherwise it can be very expensive. Initially keep your daily budget less than $10. If you do not see any sale for 300 clicks, you must consider some other product. Whether to have large or small list of keywords depends on your objective. Normally you should go for more specific and targeted keywords which are cheaper than broad keywords. More keywords means more traffic, but we do not need just traffic, it has to be a good quality and targeted traffic.
In PPC advertising the first important step is keyword research. You can use any keyword tool like Yahoo’s overture, Google, MSN, keyword discovery etc. to get more related keywords. You can even try some keyword spy tools which can show your competitors’ keywords and ads. Initially use only searched keywords, not the content feature offered by some PPC programs. Minimize using broad keywords. Use more long tail keywords and ‘exact’ and ‘phrase’ match if available. If you are using few keywords- they should be long tailed, targeted, and bid should be such that the ad position comes to 1-4. Use of misspelled keywords can also be tried. If you need really cheap clicks, you can try some PPC like goclick.com who accept bids as low as $0.01. You must use quality ads following the guidelines of the PPC company, to increase CTR.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chandra_Dev
March 27 2008 | SEM | No Comments »
Source - VentureRepublic.com
10 steps to successful Corporate Branding
Corporate branding is a potentially strong tool for re-aligning a corporate strategy and ensures that the corporation - big or small - is leveraging adequately on the un-tapped internal and external resources. VentureRepublic believes - and our experience across clients shows - that a strong CEO and a dedicated management team are always seeking to raise their own bars and be change agents for their corporations backed by a strong corporate branding strategy. A well-drafted and professionally managed corporate branding strategy and implementation plan can be a powerful component of the board room work.
VentureRepublic has identified 10 crucial steps on the way to a successful corporate branding strategy, and they can serve as a useful guide for any corporate branding project.
1. The CEO needs to lead the brand strategy workThe starting point for corporate branding must be the board room, which is also serving as the most important check-point during the project. The CEO must be personally involved in the brand strategy work, and he/she must be passionate and fully buy into the idea of branding. To ensure success despite the daily and stressful routine with many duties at the same time, the CEO must be backed by a strong brand management team of senior contributors, who can facilitate a continuous development and integration of the new strategy.
2. Build your own model as not every model suits allAll companies have their own specific requirements, own sets of business values and a unique way of doing things. Therefore, even the best and most comprehensive branding models have to be tailored to these needs and requirements. Often, only a few but important adjustments are needed to align them with other similar business models and strategies in the company to create a simplified toolbox. Remember that branding is the face of a business strategy so these two areas must go hand in hand.
3. Involve your stakeholders including the customersWho knows more about your company than the customers, the employees and many other stakeholders? This is common sense, but many companies forget these simple and easily accessible sources of valuable information for the branding strategy. A simple rule is to use 5% of the marketing budget on research and at least obtain a fair picture of the current business landscape including the current brand image among stakeholders, brand positioning and also any critical paths ahead. Simply do not forget the valuable voice of your customers in this process.
4. Advance the corporate visionThe corporate branding strategy is an excellent channel for advancing the corporate vision throughout the company. It allows the management to involve, educate and align everyone around the corporate objectives, values and future pathway. It provides a guiding star and leads everyone in the same direction. The internal efforts are at least 50% of making a corporate branding strategy successful.
5. Exploit new technologyModern technology should play a part of a successful corporate branding strategy. Technology helps to gain effectiveness and improve the competitive edge of the corporation. A well-designed and fully updated Intranet is a must in today’s working environment which has become increasingly virtual with employees working from home, from other locations and traveling across the globe to name only a few factors. An Extranet can facilitate a much more seem less integration with strategic partners, suppliers and customers, avoid time consuming paper work and manual handling of many issues. A company website is not only a must, but rather a crucial channel for any modern corporation regardless of size. If the corporation is not accessible on the Internet, it does not exist! The more professional the website, the better the perception among the Internet savvy modern customer. Gone are the days where corporations could get along with a business card portrayed on the Internet.
6. Empower people to become brand ambassadorsThe most important asset in a corporation is its people. They do interact every day with colleagues, customers, suppliers, competitors and industry experts to name a few. But they also interact with an impressive number of people totally disconnected to the corporation in form of family members, friends, former colleagues and many others. Hence they serve as the corporations most important brand ambassadors as the word-of-mouth can be extremely valuable and have great impact on the overall image of the corporate brand image. The most effective way to turn employees into brand ambassadors is to train everyone adequately in the corporate brand strategy (vision, values and personality etc.) and making sure they fully understand - and believe! - what exactly the corporation aims at being in the minds of its customers and stakeholders. Nike is a brand which is known for their efforts into educating and empowering everyone employed by the company to be strong brand ambassadors.
7. Create the right delivery systemThe corporate brand is the face of the business strategy and basically it promises what all stakeholders should expect from the corporation. Therefore, the delivery of the right products and services with all the implications this entail should be carefully scrutinized and evaluated on performance before any corporation starts a corporate branding project. Think of the cradle to grave concept of a lifelong customer and the value he/she will provide in such a time span. Make sure he/she is handled with outstanding care according to internal specifications and outside expectations. The moment of truth is when the corporate brand promise is delivered well - and it does not hurt if the corporation exceeds the customer expectation. Singapore Airlines runs a very rigid, detailed and in-depth description of any customer touch points with the corporation, and several resources are spend on making sure it actually does happen every time to every customer. All employees regardless of title and rank from Singapore Airlines spend a not insignificant amount of workdays being trained every year.
8. Communicate!Bring the corporate brand to life through a range of well-planned, well-executed marketing activities, and make sure the overall messages are consistent, clear and relevant to the target audiences. Make sure the various messages are concise and easy to comprehend. Do not try to communicate every single point from the corporate branding strategy. Instead, a selective approach will make much more impact using the same resources.
9. Measure the brand performanceA brand is accountable and so should a corporate brand be. How much value does it provide to the corporation and how instrumental is the brand in securing competitiveness? These are some of the questions which need to be answered and which the CEO will automatically seek as part of his/her commitment to run the strategy successfully. The brand equity consists of various individually tailor-made key performance indicators (including the financial brand value) and needs to be tracked regularly. A brand score card can help facilitating an overview of the brand equity and the progression as the strategy is implemented.
10. Adjust relentlessly and be ready to raise your own bar all the timesThe business landscape is changing almost every day in every industry. Hence the corporation needs to evaluate and possibly adjust the corporate branding strategy on a regular basis. Obviously, a corporate brand should stay relevant, differentiated and consistent throughout time, so it is a crucial balance. The basic parts of the corporate branding strategy like vision, identity, personality and values are not to be changed often as they are the basic components. The changes are rather small and involve the thousands of daily actions and interpersonal behaviors, which the corporations employ as part of the brand marketing efforts. But make sure complacency does not take root in the organisation and affects the goal setting. The strong brands are the ones which are driven forward by owners whom never get tired of raising their own bars. They become their own change agents - and brand champions for great brands.
March 25 2008 | Branding | No Comments »
Its been a decent time, I had been trying to market our clients websites now, and for sure the biggest help I ever got was from RankQuest Toolbar. It probably is the only one I know of its kind.
The best part about the RankQuest is that it gets installed on Windows 98 as well. A few of members of the SEO team in my previous company, used Windows 98 and it was difficult for them to check the page rank, as Google Toolbar requires atleast windows Xp. With page rank available on this tool bar it really helped.
All you do to start with is type the URL in the toolbar, and click on whatever you are looking for, a web page opens with a detailed information about it.
- You can check for Server Header Validation and verify the HTTP status codes. Over 36 HTTP Codes are checked but only seven (200 | 301 | 302 | 304 | 307 | 404 | 410 ) are of interest to us from an indexing and search engine optimization perspective.
- The Link Checker tools checks for broken links in a page. Broken links are links that show a “page not found” (404) error or something similar when clicked. This tool checks absolute links (http://www.mysite.com), relative (../mypage.htm) links, in-page links (e.g. yourpage.htm#top), links to other pages on your site (e.g. yoursite/yourpage.htm), links to other sites (e.g. yoursite.com), images links on your page (png, gif, jpg & bmp) and images inside HTML forms. It displays the link status as one of the three options -
- The third tool, and one of my favorites, removes unnecessary HTML tags in a page the can adversely affect the performance of a page in the SERP rankings. HTML Code Cleaner helps you avoid the same by removing unnecessary HTML tags and spaces in a page and thus reducing the page size. The tags that have been removed, the reduction in the page size and the new cleaned page are all displayed in the result. There is also a provision to save the optimized page - which is what I like the most *wink*
- A page that has HTML errors can be difficult for a Search Engine Spider to crawl. Thus it is advisable to have your page HTML validated to spot any errors that may be there in the page. The HTML Validator spots all errors in your page based on W3C standards and lists them with the line number so that you can make necessary corrections.
- Most Search Engine Spiders see your page much the same way as a text browser like Lynx will do. The Lynx Viewer tool in the toolbar, shows the Lynx view of your webpage, and you can use this information to find out what words/links look more prominent.
- One of the factors that search engines use in ranking a webpage is the percentage of text in the web page. The Simply put code to text ratio is % of text in the page / % of html code in the page. Search Engines use this ratio to determine the relevancy of your page and higher this value more your chances of ranking higher. And this is what is calculated by Code to Text Ratio Tool.
- The Link Explorer, explores links in the URL provided and creates a tree view of the same.
- When it is SEO, keywords play the most important role. The Keyword Density Analyzer tool of this toolbar helps you find out the density values for words/phrases in various important parts of your page, like Tile Tag, Meta Tags, Body Tags, Alt Tags etc.
- The Web Speed Report shows how fast your web page loads. Web page should be optimized, if it takes time to load.
- The Meta Tag Analyzer examines the Meta information of the entered URL and lets you know if the content is Search Engine Friendly or not.
- The Link Popularity Tool helps the user to measure how many other sites indexed by each search engine have links to each of the site provided.
Apart from these there are several other tools, which I leave for you to review and post in the comments 
Signing Off,
Sameer
March 20 2008 | SEM | 2 Comments »
Hello friends,
Everyone here at NSI is very excited about our new venture - Our BLOG. We all are considering it to be like a new born baby - with programmers acting like PUNDITS (Hindu Priests) giving all their valuble suggestions on what all is to be added, whats the best way to do what, etc. etc. I keep away from the technical aspects, as I do from the religious people, but thats a whole different story. Back to the baby blog, the designers, are acting like the relatives, who seem to be so happy and come and gift one or the other to it.
I am the lucky one - chosen to be the first one to have the baby in my lap. I am the one writing the first post. About the baby, well we plan to make it our own space. Where we can write about our observations, discoveries, mistakes, experiences about various aspects, directly or indirectly related to Branding Solutions. We welcome your comments on whatever we contribute, and plan to have this as a space for discussion.
Hoping that you would help the baby grow, and would enjoy your stay here at this blog -
Signing Off,
Sameer
March 18 2008 | General | 4 Comments »
