The Blog Evolution Continues

I was blown away this morning by a single paragraph. In his monthly rant in PC Magazine, John Dvorak solidified the future of Wordpress as a content management system and created a moniker for the new breed of blogs hitting the web.

These new “neo-blogs“, as Dvorak coined them, utilize the Wordpress software for more than blogging. Through the effective use of template design, plugins, widgets and pages, a website built on the Wordpress software can become a full-fledged website and not merely a blog.

This is a real turning point for blogging.

For the past 6 months, a slow change has been happening. Blogs were becoming more robust. No longer are all blogs simply linear, chronological posting sites.

Blogs now have supporting pages of content and content organizationed based on topic, age of the content and reader value.

In fact, the best of the new breed don’t feel like blogs at all. They feel more that magazine websites.

I am so in favor of this new trend of what I have termed “blogsites”, that Draven Creation hasn’t built a traditional blog format site all year. It has purely been extending the Wordpress system to create content centric websites, even when the client isn’t going to blog.

Choosing to use Wordpress as a content management system for your website or blog is a strong choice because:

• Website maintenance is easier. Updating content is much more difficult without a content management system.
• Traditional, chronological blogs only showcase recent content. Using advanced techniques, past content can be highlighted. Groups of posts can be combined to create featured content.
• There is no need to have a website and a blog. Search engines love blogs, so why not add your traditional website content as pages to your Wordpress blog? Maintaining and promoting 1 website is much easy and cheaper than doing the same for a website and separate blog.

Draven Creation builds exclusively on the Wordpress platform, using the latest techniques and trends. This strategy provides our clients with custom, value-added websites that are easier and less expensive to build and maintain. Call for more information, 209.679.5801 or send an email.

Staging Your Website

Take a moment to think of your real estate agent website and envision it as a home that you are about to list. Go through each page on your website as you would each room of a home. Identify the selling points, as well as, the low points.

There are many similarities between a home for sale and a real estate agent website. I think the most important commonality is that of the effective use of negative space, known as whitespace in the web design world.

If you, as a real estate agent, go to list a home, do you not make suggestions to the homeowner on how to make the home look more appealing? If a room is full of clutter, knick-knacks and too much furniture, do you suggest that items be placed in storage while the home is listed? The goal is to make the space to appear larger and more inviting. [Read more]