I have a bone to pick with you. Yes, you with the wordpress.com blog (or blogger.com or squarespace, take your pick). You see I have no problem with your personal blog being on one of those subdomains. In fact I have no problem with any those services or your personal blogs on them. The problem I have is when you put your professional, corporate blogs up like: companyname.wordpress.com. You see that makes me think a few things about you:

• you’re too cheap or broke to pay for a real domain name
• you’ve got no clue when it comes to the internet
• is this a legitimate blog? (Its free, anyone can claim any name)

But beyond the first impression problems there are some other issues you should consider. The first issue at hand is how search engines see you and your ability to impact them. The second problem comes with the blogging software that you’re using. A third issue is the control that you have to give up over your brand. These are certainly not the only problems that stem from using a service and not having your own domain name but these are at the forefront. Let us know what you think other issues are in the comments

Search Engines

A couple of different things happen when you blog under a sub-domain. First your blog gets less weight and becomes more lumped in with the other blogs residing under the same domain name. Because anyone can start a free blog and the massive amounts of spam blogs on most popular free blogging services, search engines are going to devalue your content to start out with. You’re starting out with a handicap. Not a big deal when it’s a personal blog and your intent is to reach friends and family—a much bigger deal when you wish to appear professional. Beyond the initial impression that search engines have of your site, you have very little control over moving or redirecting search engines, should you change the structure of your blog or move a blog post etc. Using a free blogging service often limits the level of access  you have to optimize on page elements that impact your search engine ranking too.

Blogging Software

By going with a free blogging platform (and not purchasing a domain name upgrade) you place yourself in the hands of the company running that service. If you’re running your own version of that software, you have much more control over it and nothing will happen to your site if the company putting out the software goes out of business or is acquired by another company etc. Blogger was originally it’s own company and while it’s still doing well, it was bought by Google. If you were too tied to that platform and they made changes you didn’t like, you wouldn’t have any options (like running an older version of the software). With blogging software like WordPress there are a great deal of powerful plugins and customizations that you can make but only if you’re running your own version of the software. If you’re running a professional business these limitations are a big problem.

Brand Control

Putting your website on a sub-domain gives up control of your brand. Operating your website there places you under terms of service that you probably didn’t read and that could change at any time. Often blogging platforms like these have terms that are restrictive about the way that you can promote products and services. You could be placing yourself in a difficult situation if you haven’t carefully reviewed these terms. By using a sub-domain you’re also giving away control over your brand name. People visiting your blog will always see the main domain name and your name instead of just your name.

Conclusion

Hopefully these thoughts make you pause before you go off and signup for a free blogging service somewhere. If that’s what you do, at least make sure that you choose one that offers a data export so that you can move your posts somewhere else without too much difficulty. Please note that I have no problem with using services like wordpress.com to handle your company blog if that’s what you feel best meets your needs. Just make sure at the very least that you purchase a real domain name and the service upgrade that lets you use it with wordpress.com. That will mitigate all of the issues here except for being able to install plugins and add-ons other than the ones that they offer.

What are your thoughts? Do you trust company blogs that are run from wordpress.com or some other sub-domain?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Ditch the subdomain—stand out from the crowd

How long as it been since you updated the copyright date on your website? I don’t know about you but I see this as one of those little things that is important. Same as a company blog that hasn’t been updated in months. Did you know that you can keep the copyright date on your site up-to-date with just one simple line of code?

Yep, all you have to do is use the following code:
<?php print date('Y'); ?>

That’s all it takes for your site to display an up-to-date copyright date. Blogging isn’t quite so easy but you should really get rid of the blog if you’re not going to post anything to it. You’re probably losing sales because people wonder if you’re still around. Neglected blogs make me wonder what else you neglect.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

It’s the Little Things

Just finished reading an article @guykawasaki linked to on Twitter about a great new idea. The idea is that there are a lot of great blogs out there that have great content but that are overlooked. Sadly this leads to good writers having a hard time being motivated and often what could have been great blogs die out because of it. So the idea is that this group will take a new blog with great content under their wing for a couple of weeks and everyone in the group will read and comment on that blog during that time.

I think its a great idea but its needs some polish. At this point there are 581 comments to that blog post. That is a lot of people! I really think that there are a lot of deserving blogs out there that could benefit from this impact but I think sending 400-500 people to a single blog is crazy! If the people commenting on this post are really excited about being active and contributing like this then awesome. They should be broken down into smaller groups. If you figure a 50% rate of people actually being active every day/week then smaller groups of about 40-50 would be much more optimum. This size will keep the blogger from being bogged down with too many comments and allow the wealth of these visitors to be spread around much more effectively. If we just send 500 people to a new blog every week it will take some time to get around.

Even better if these groups are randomly generated so that no one could complain that someone got a celebrity blogger visiting their site and they didn’t since the groups are randomized. Also would be good if the groups were based on activity some how. Perhaps we could build a script that crawls the blogs in question and checks for comments from the groups members. It would be a great way to ensure fairness in assigning people that want their blog to be given a chance at this attention too. If you’re not participating then you don’t get to show up in the queue.

Just a few of my thoughts on this lazy, sleepy afternoon in Iowa. Getting ready to pack up and head back to South Carolina in the morning.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

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