You may have noticed one thing that sets this blog apart from the majority right away. It wasn’t done as a mistake and it isn’t something I may change in the future.
Right now, there are no dates on the blog home page to indicate when I’ve posted an item to the blog. I’ve done this to show you how you can use a blog even if you don’t intend to provide a steady stream of new content to your site.
When you set up a blog you gain a lot of functionality on the back-end that makes maintaining your web presence very easy. Every time you do write something to your site, all you need to do is type it in and hit the publish button. WordPress programming — with a little help from the plugins we use — takes over to keep things neat and organized from that point on.
Without you having to do a thing, here’s what happens in the background:
- A permanent spot in your directory (or permalink/single post) url is assigned
- The story is published on top of your blog home page as most recent
- Internal links between all posts are established/adjusted
- Backend links are created within categories, page or post types so you can find and edit this post easily
- Navigation links are made, updated and displayed on every page of your blog
- Links between the category you select and the post itself are established
- Any images, video links, podcasts, or other audio links are automatically sorted to the right directories and stored for you
- Links between the post and any image or other asset file are created or adjusted as a the post is moved
- A notation on your sitemap is made and the search engine spiders are notified (pinged) that there is fresh copy for them to come index
- Your RSS feed is updated and subscribers notified that you have added content
…and so on and so on. It really is true that the blog you see is only the very tip of the iceberg that is all of your blog. It’a slso true that there can be no magic formula that will tell you when it makes sense for you to set up a static website and when it makes sense to set up a semi-static blog. The choice comes down to how much money, time or expertise you have to lavish on your website/blog.
Do you have time to go through and complete each of these tasks manually if you post infrequently? Even if you only made two additions or two deletions to the content of your website each year, chances are good you would overlook one or more of these steps. That’s assuming you worked from a very good checklist that remembered them all for you in the first place.
On the other hand, dates do help. Human readers love fresh changing content as much as the search engine spiders. They want to see that they’re getting the up to date scoop on all the specials in your retail store, or know that you’re up on the latest judicial rulings relevant to the legal case they may want you to handle for them, etc.
I’m going to continue making entries to this blog without dates for a few months. Of course I’ll be watching my stats closely. It will be interesting to see if traffic to this blog does or doesn’t grow at roughly the rate I’ve come to expect using web 2.0 promotion methods. Benchmarking numbers on this point are the one thing I wasn’t able to find, so we’ll just have to grow some ourselves — along with your comments and observations of course.
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