Saturday again, so I'm allowed to post a little off the "effective winery Web site" topic. I'd like to point you to Robert "Microsoft Blogger" Scoble's list of what separates blogs from a vanilla Web sites:
- Ease of publishing (just type and Submit)
- Automatically notifies search engines and aggregators of new posts ("pinging")
- Trackbacks ("Hey, I posted about your post!")
- Granularity of reference (you can link to an individual post)
- RSS feed (machine-readable list of recent updates)
I kept the same order as Robert, so you can compare my explanation and nomenclature with his. I think that #1, #2, and #5 are the most significant (historically, #2 and #3 came along later).
This is why you might want both a winery blog and a winery Web site.
Of course, you can use blogging software to build your winery website too, incorporating an actual blog within the larger site. This gives the winery easy control over content, and gives you the advantages of blogs (pinging of search engines, RSS feeds, etc) for all of the pages. Post excerpts from flattering new reviews on your News or Wines page? Post it using the blogging software's content management tools, and have those changes ping search engines.
Posted by: rick gregory | May 20, 2006 at 08:43 AM