[UPHPU] Best way to incorporate blog into web site

[MilesTogoe]

Wade Preston Shearer wrote:
> 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.
Hey, and I see you're listed as the page author!   Kudos - it's very 
nicely done and a great example.   Thanks for the feedback on all the 
options.