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.

Answer Reader Questions For Success

Why do people visit real estate agent and mortgage broker websites and blogs? Unlike YouTube, people don’t surf these sites for entertainment. Nor are they looking for the local weather forecast.

When someone visits a local real estate agent or mortgage broker website, they have questions and are looking for answers. The better job you can do in answering those questions, the more valuable you are to that potential client.

When I reference answering questions, I am not talking about the ability for site readers to post questions for you to follow with an answer. While this can work when done properly (a great example is Trulia Voices), I am actually talking about the overall content on your website.

When writing any content for your site, you must first consider the audience. Who are they? What is of value to them? What questions might they be seeking answers to? [Read more]