Saturday, July 09, 2005

We are, like, all about the blogging right now.

Blogs are pretty trendy at the moment. Everybody's doing it. Everybody's adding a blog to their site. Well our site IS a blog, and always has been. Over a year ago we decided that a blog would act as a simple CMS (content management system) for a simple funny cartoon site.

We chose Blogger because of it's simplicity, both to set up and to use. The downside of Blogger is a certain lack of control. When the Blogger team make changes to the software, they get rolled out and bam, that's it you're stuck with it. Or when Blogger goes down (rarely I admit), you don't have access to add/edit posts. Wordpress is hosted on your own server, and we like the idea of changing over to wordpress, however I don't think it will happen anytime soon.

Why? Well, we now have not one but three seperate blogs on BifSniff.com.

Why? You see, shortly after we started we realised that search engines play an important part in building traffic to a small site like ours with no PR or marketting budget. And search engines rely mainly on text content to index sites. And there we were adding image after image and no text content to be seen for a mile. So we added a new blog for Bif's musings, to keep the cartoons and text seperate, but allow quick and easy addition of text content. Which turned out to be a great idea, because Bif keeps a good eye on what's going on in the funny cartoons and web comics space and posts about it regularly. It's a nice easy way for lazy old me to find out what's new.

Then we have my corner here (I'm the artist by the way, Bif the writer), where I talk mainly about what we do and why we do it and the technical implications!

With Wordpress I think it might be awkward to replicate the format we have here - we would probably have to set up three instances of Wordpress. If anyone has any suggestions please send them on... I wondered for example could we take advantage of the categories in Wordpress. Have different categories 'cartoon', 'musings' and 'frank's crap' or something. But I don't know how to control the display of categories. We would probably have to program some kind of hack... and that's not really our strong point!

Anyway, my point really was just that while all the business magazines are finally getting around to writing about 'Blogging for Business' and all the rest of it, myself and Bif were ahead of the game driving up our traffic with a blog and all the benefits it entails.

As well as the handy functionality for adding the cartoons, Bif's musings help people find the site through search engines and also give an idea of the personality behind the site - and, if anyone was bothered, a place to discuss/argue with Bif through the comments.