Starting a business blog: what does your next web site need to do?

A blog is a lot more than posts in a row. A blog is a content management system - often, a very complex and powerful one.

We use Wordpress to run this site, which lets us create posts, pages, dynamically generate an event schedule, manage a dynamic sponsors database, offer e-mail subscription to our content, syndicate our content through the RSS ecosystem, allow users to suggest conference sessions and allow said users to vote on which sessions seem best, and a score of other things that often remain invisible to the visitor (SEO, for example).

Hmmm…that’s a lot of stuff.

If it’s time to re-work your company website, it would be a good idea to sit down for a minute and figure out what that web site needs to do. Chances are it needs to do a lot of blog things (which are hard to build into a non-blog system) and a few non-blog things (which are very easy to build into a blog system).