Blog - on or off site

23 January 2012

The other day I tweeted:

On a corporate site, would you put blog on the site or use third party ie. Blogger ?

— Matthew Roach (@faxtion) January 19, 2012

The reason I tweeted this was I overheard some people talking about having a blog on their website, but then they where instructed it would be best to set it up on blogger. The reason behind the person suggesting them to use blogger was it’s free. Nothing else was taken in to consideration, use blogger as it’s free and we can link off to it just like you would to your Twitter or Facebook.

This got me thinking, why would you suggest to use a third party service for a blog, and if your were why blogger, especially when the person requesting a blog is going to be having a nice site built showcasing their work, which also would be added to over time. The blog will be getting used to document projects, up and coming, and in progress, then once the project has been completed it would be documented in the correct section of the website.

So again, why suggest using blogger? I am not 100% sure.

But, if I was suggesting something it would be to keep it on the actual website, add another navigation item named, wait for it! “Blog”.

A couple of reasons for this are that the blog is going be used quite similar to news in this instance, documenting projects that are coming up, and a place to keep users up to date on these projects, so the blog is located on the site as it’s completely relevant to the site and the company.
As “Content is King” having the blog on site would also help with the SEO of the complete site.
Also, building up the brand of the company and sharing insightful information related to the industry the company is operating in by having the blog on site will raise awareness of the company.

One other point is that if using social media to promote your brand/company, having a website and a blog in two different locations it’s going to become confusing for users on where to go for the information, also while using social media to push out your message’s you’ll end up duplicating the same message over and over as you have two channels to which you are putting information.
By keeping the blog on site it’s still a separate channel within the main site but it keeps it all under one roof, a consistent user experience can be achieved.