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A blog? A board? A content management system? Be careful which one you choose - the wrong choice could make your site difficult to work with in the future.I initially touched on this subject in my blog entry, Before you start blogging... Think! I'm going to go into more detail here.
Starting with a blog
If I said "don't start with a blog", I'm sure a lot of bloggers would say it worked for them, so what's the problem? Well, if you only have a blog, there isn't a problem at all.Where it falls down if you're a musician who has a blog but who also wants to put music on the site. Putting a track in a blog entry is fine for posting new music, but doesn't really work when people want to see all of the tracks from an album.
Similarly, if you're a photographer who blogs occasionally but you want people to look at your photos more than anything else, posting photos in your blog is just not the best way to go about building your site.
So why not add a gallery? Well, that's the point here... thinking about what is at the heart of your site. If your site is primarily focused on a gallery, why build the main site with a blog? Remember, you can still have a blog as well as a gallery... just don't try to use a blog as a gallery. It's not what it was designed to do.
Starting with a board
I've come across boards that try to add a website at a later date, and it doesn't go too well. The website lacks substance because the main focus was always the board. A general chat board probably can't provide much in the way of website content unless there are some heavily themed forums... but then the website could become a bit of a mish-mash.Now, if the board has a strong theme - one that could actually be written about on a website - then building a site to go with the forum might just work. But forums are usually there to comment on a site... so I think the site should come first, if there's ever going to be one.
So before you set up a board, think about whether you might ever have a site that has a board to go with it. If so, having a board at the centre might not work too well... a well-integrated board could work best. Plan the site first.
Starting with a content management system (CMS)
This is my preferred route, as it's the best way to organise content on a site that has more than just a blog. If you use a CMS that you'd like to use for the main website, but there are additional gallery systems and message boards that you want to use too, by all means use them all. Just view them as add-ons to the CMS - rather than the CMS being an add-on to something else.Incidentally, some CMS products can be used as a perfectly good blog too. CMS does not mean "it won't let you blog". This is a stigma that some people have attached to CMS products and I don't agree with it at all.
Get it right from the start
Whatever you choose to use for your site, it's a lot harder to change things around once you've made a start than it is to get it right from the start. Don't be impatient or lazy and dive in without proper planning. If you can't be bothered to plan, then you might find problems when things don't work out quite as you expected them to.What do you think?
What works for you?What kind of site are you thinking of setting up?
Tags: blogging, planning, blog, cms, gallery, board, integration
Posted by Ben on November 29, 2007 21:55 / Edited: April 24, 2008 20:46
Comments
Hi Ben,
Actually a solution for musicians or photographers might be to add a link to the horizontal menu of their blog (like what you have done) and then designating that as a page rather than a post, if you are using Wordpress.
That gives you the ability to add photos or music albums to a designated page but does not interfere with the posts that come on you front page.
BTW, is the music uploaded on your site your own? They are cool!
Hi Derek, glad you found the post useful. Thanks for the comment.
Hi Ivy - thanks for commenting again! I think that method can work, but it could get a bit unmanageable if you have a lot of content. For instance if you have a few tracks or photos then that could look good... but if you put albums there, you'll have to link to further pages... and it all gets a bit messy.
I view this in much the same way as I view the CMS-style addons for vbulletin. I think vbulletin is an excellent board, but they should stick to boards. A CMS that is really just an add-on to a forum just doesn't seem to have the same capabilities as a standard CMS does. Similarly, I find a CMS to be much more flexible than a system that was primarily designed for blogging. It's all about what you want to use it for. You can always try to get more out of a system and sometimes the results are quite good, but I prefer using a CMS as I get a lot more control.
And yes, the music is all my own work. Thank you! :)
Oh me gosh! Could you design album covers, sign them on them and give them out as freebies to people who subscribe to your blog?? That would be totally cool!!! If you do do that, could I have one? I'm already subscribed!
Thanks for the idea, Ivy ... it's a good one!
The only thing is, it wouldn't be automated... I'd have to set up a group that subscribers can be given access to. I might have to ask people to subscribe by email as then I can check their email address in Feedburner against the one on my site. If they match up, you get in.
I already have artwork for my first two albums, which I could put online for people to download. I could also provide sneak previews of future tracks and so on.
What do you think?
Hi Ben,
I don't think it needs to be that complicated.
In Feedburner, there's a function that allows you to customize text at the bottom of the feed. You can use that feed to insert the URL of the page where they can download your album covers. Just don't link that page your site so that only subscribers will have access to your album covers.
I didn't know Feedburner could do that. Thanks, Ivy! That would be a good way to get the word out to my subscribers.
However, I still think that having a "subscribers area" on the site with restricted access would be a good way for subscribers to go back and get anything they might have missed. It means I don't have to hide the link on my site, which I prefer not to do. If subscribers click elsewhere on my site and want to get to the subscribers area again, there should be an easy link for them to do so.
It's fine if people see the links as they come up and click through, but if I get more subscribers in the future, they might miss some of the early ones. I could keep including the links several times over but that could get annoying.
Also, it's another incentive to get people to register. ;) And it's an incentive for me to give more to the subscribers. I can use Feedburner to alert people of new content in the subscribers area and use restricted access on my site to share top secret stuff.
i think it's a really cool idea and gives more incentive to actually stop by the site.
Thanks, Liz! :)
You're reading my mind and anticipating my questions, Ben! The idea of having a "subscribers only" section is one of the elements I've pretty much settled on as essential for a proposed new site... and Majestic would let me do that fairly easily, right?
Hi Jen, thanks for the comment. :) Yes, Majestic allows you to make certain areas of your site accessible to people within a certain user group. You can also allow certain user groups to add content to some of your areas if you want to have several blogs. The permissions are extremely flexible.
Being a web developer, programmer, and hobbyist game developer, my site needs to contain my resume and list of projects I've been involved with.
Currently, I only have a single HTML page to act as such. However, as I would like to expand upon that and get more into the world of blogging, I've been working with LifeFlow, a built-for-programmers-by-programmers blog/project hosting platform. It needs some polish, but since it's built upon Django it's been extremely easy to modify to my exact needs.
Great post with even better advice.