Today we decided to 'skin' the spiral Blog to make it fit in with the rest of our site.
There are three great reasons for this:
1) To keep the spiral branding when people are reading the Blog. Having invested in a custom built web site with a look and feel to represent your company it seems silly not to carry this look and feel through to your Blog.
2) Bringing the main navigation from the website into the Blog so users can efficiently access your site.
3) SEO (search engine optimisation). Modern search engines rely heavily on two things content and links. The content on your Blog although not as keyword rich as say a well-designed homepage is likely to contain many of the key words and phrases relevant to your business. Links between your Blog and your site will help improve the ranking of both as they are indexed.
Once it has been 'skinned' and linked the Blog can be treated as part of the companies' web site rather than a separate entity.
Something else worth mentioning is a feed from your Blog can be used to add some dynamic content to your home page which will keep the interest of both users and search engines. See the right hand column of www.spiral.co.nz/ for and example of this.
We have since removed the skin on our blog and gone back to the skins or templates provided by blogger.com. Why? simply so I can experience blogging in a manner similar to our customers.
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