Wrightsites.com Hosting Blog

Welcome to the all new Wrightsites.com blog!  On this blog, we will post company news, industry news, new technologies being offered, website design techniques, marketing ideas, and anything else that may be considered useful to our customers.   There will be an article published here at least once per week – usually on Thursday nights.  I will write most of the articles here, but will occasionally have a guest author.

We’ll start out with blogs themselves.  Many people believe blogs to be nothing more than an online diary where people often tell more about themselves than they should.  It is true that many people do use blogs in this way, but they can be much more.  Just as I plan to do here, you can share information with your customers.  This information can be anything from helpful pointers to new product releases.  Good blog articles can assist your present customers, attract new customers, and even bring back your old customers!  The possibilities are almost endless.

Blogging is informal writing.  So while I don’t suggest using poor grammar and spelling habits, it isn’t the end of the world.  There is a lesser expectation of perfection in the blogging world – including in professional blogs.  I wouldn’t use a lot of web slang like “LOL” and “ROFL” but an occasional use is fine.  You don’t need to write something every day, but try to keep a schedule.  I am going to try and have articles published on Thursday nights.  Once per week is sufficient – remember that your readers have other important things to do besides just waiting for you to publish something new.  Most importantly though, keep it interesting.  At the end of each posting, try to give some hint as to what will be happening the next time you publish.

Maybe you aren’t sure where to get started.  Don’t let that stop you!  Blogging is easy to start, but be aware that you have many options.  Do you want to build your blog as part of your website or use a separate provider, such as Blogger.com or Live Blog.  The advantage to a separate provider is that you don’t have to worry about keeping your blogging software up-to-date, but they have some disadvantages as well.  Keeping your blog as part of your website gives you the freedom to customize the blog to look exactly like your site – something you can’t do with blogging providers.  You also have the advantage of being able to add features that you find valuable, not just the feature-set that the commercial bloggers offer.  Finally, you can get better statistics about who is viewing your blog, what articles are popular, and maybe find out if the blog is bringing new customers.  If you choose an outside blogging site, I suggest you thoroughly read their setup and help files.  If you’re interested in adding some blogging software to your website, read on.

There are many blogging scripts available for free download on the web.  Most will be written in PHP and will require a MySQL database.  Here at Wrightsites.com, all plans Bronze and above include the necessary resources to create most blogs.  In fact, you can install two of the best known scripts from within your H-Sphere Control Panel: b2Evolution and WordPress.  Both are good and I believe both are easy to use.  My personal preference is for b2Evolution, which is what is powering this blog.  I’m not entirely certain why I prefer it though – it could be because it was the one I used first.  I do think that b2Evo is more powerful – giving you more control over various system preferences.  It also allows you to have multiple users that can post blogs to the same or different areas of the blog site.  In either case, from your control panel, go to the EasyApps Collection and turn it on.  A list of programs will appear that can be installed.  Blogs is the first category on the left and you can click on each name to get a description of the software.  Once you click on the software name, you will see an Install link that will take care of the installation for you.  If you choose one of these packages, I caution you to keep in mind that feature and security updates are published for these programs on a regular basis.  Installation of these updates is a manual process until Parallels (maker of H-Sphere) fixes the EasyApps package.  If you need assistance with this, just send us an email and we’ll help out.

If you have thoughts or suggestions on this blog, I’d love to hear them.  You can leave comments, which won’t be published immediately as I need to screen out the spammers.  But even if you disagree with me on something, I’ll still post your comments because I believe opposing views are necessary to provide a good base for decision making.  I think these fingers have spewed enough into this article for now, so I’ll close out this first article by saying thank you to anyone who actually made it this far without falling asleep!  I normally will tell you the subject of my next article, but I have so many choices right now that I haven’t narrowed it down yet.  Be sure to check back next Thursday to see!