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Blogs a New Way of Doing the Same Old Thing

Blogs - Information Superhighway

Posted by Adam Hayes

Blogs or web logs are great, cost efficient ways of providing up-to-date information for clients and search engines.

Lately it seems that Blogs have become the craze of the Internet. Everyone has one: dentists, artists, CEOs, poor starving college students, everyone. Blogs are a wonderful way to quickly and cost effectively publish new information on the web. Recent blog programs provide user friendly ways of allowing everyone to publish their thoughts, political views, etc. on the web without the aid of a website programmer.

Although this craze seems to be the "new way" of doing things on the web, it really is the same old thing web designers have stated for years. Websites should provide up-to-date, compelling information to capture new clients and keep existing ones. Blogs merely facilitate this by removing many of the obstacles to updating websites (slow web designers, information transmission (you submit your blog and it is immediately live and on the web), and editors just to mention a few). The same results can be accomplished by a good content management system (CMS) and a dedicated employee in charge of the website.

Search engines have loved and hated this move to blogs. They love blogs because there is new, recent, updated information to provide to their searching customers. Unfortunately, it also loads their databases with entries about aunt Julie's cat and why the girl that sits next to Nate always picks her nose.

Blogs have many advantages:

• A well designed blog can help businesses disseminate information to clients at an unprecedented rate.
• Spiders will visit your site more often and index new pages faster because you have a well designed blog with new content.
• Simplicity allows everyone (even your 8 year old nephew or idiot intern) to place their ideas where everyone can read them.

They also have their disadvantages:

• Without the aid of web designers, many pages are not optimized to facilitate the increase in search engine spider visits.
• The ease of adding large images, sounds, backgrounds, text color, etc. has created numerous pages that might have a lot of new content, but are practically illegible.
• Who really cares about aunt Julie's cat?
  

While those members of the blogger community, who demand up-to-date information about events that happened 3 minutes ago, currently have a definite impact on the world wide web, we will have to wait and see if this craze will pass with time or if this new way of doing the same old thing will become the only way. Until then, I'll keep optimizing and updating the article, i mean blog, section of my website.