Tasha Harrison

Earlier this month John Lewis launched their new ecommerce site for mobile. Instead of creating an app for users, they simply created a dedicated mobile site.  In the past couple of years, companies have gone crazy creating their own dedicated apps. Amazon’s app is particularly innovative, enabling you to take pictures of products and then go back and buy them from Amazon later. The app recognises the product from the picture.

Although apps offer the functionality to create a unique and different way of shopping, it is not without its problems. Firstly, there are a huge range of smart phones on which users can browse the internet, all with slightly different sized screens and using a variety of software. By building an app you are potentially ignoring the swathes of customers who choose to use devices other than the traditional smart phones – the iPhone, Google phones or Blackberries.

By creating a designated mobile site, John Lewis have not only encompassed all internet browing phones, but have saved themselves a lot of bother adapting their app for each device.

When you create your blog you need to make it not only a useful resource for people, but structured in a way that they can easy find and browse your content.

With this in mind, here are some key features to put on your blog:

Categories

A great way to divide up your blog posts and make your site easily navigable. Categories tend to develop naturally on some blogs, creating new ones when the need arises. However, be careful not to have too many, since this can become confusing for your audience, creating too much choice.

Tags

Unlike categories there is no limit to the number of tags. It gives your readers more choice and it may turn out that posts you didn’t expect turn up in the same place. Some blogs also contain a tag cloud, a great way of presenting your tags in a searchable manner.

Recent Comments

A list of the top five most recent comments will encourage people to engage with the conversation and leave a comment themselves. At the beginning of your blog this can be quite an empty box, so it may make sense to add this feature once you have a few comments.

Archives

Another great way for people to search your blog. It gives a nice history as well if your readers want to know a bit more about how the blog has grown.

A Search Bar

This one doesn’t really need an explanation, but is an absolute must!

A Blogroll

A blogroll is a list of blogs you read. This is a great resource for your readers to find other sites they may find useful. Don’t worry about them moving away from your site to read other people’s material, if your content is good enough they will come back.

RSS Feed

A little outdated as a way of bookmarking and following blogs (though I still use them), an RSS feed is a must for so many programmes and features. News readers like Google Reader use RSS feeds, and it enables you to send out automatic email updates from your blog using applications like Mail Chimp.

When writing a business blog, you are creating a resource of information related to your industry. This should be a mixture of your own expertise and sharing information from other valuable sources.

Bearing that in mind, here are my top tips:

1. Link text to articles that will be useful further reading.
2. Use articles from other industry related blogs as a basis for your post. Continue a discussion by giving an opinion and remember to always link back to the article.
3. Include a ‘Further reading’ section at the bottom of the post.
4. Where possible, link to any of your blog posts that may be relevant.
5. Present your post in an easy to read format, dividing it with headers where appropriate.
6. Use simple language and sentence structures. That’s not to say that you should dumb down your writing, but long flowery sentences can be off-putting.
7. Remember, it is very easy for someone to click away from your site if they begin to get bored, so be concise and try not to ramble.
8. Encourage people, where possible, to leave comments. Asking questions and giving strong opinions are a good starting point.

Further Reading:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/12/30/tens-tips-for-writing-a-blog-post/
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/10-blogging-tips/

Despite the popularity of blogs, I still get asked on a regular basis what a blog is for and why you would have one. There seems to be a preconception of blogs that they are a personal diary and that by having one you will have to give away many personal details. But, the personal diary is just one of the many applications for a blog.

I often think that one of the key problems of a blog is the name, derived from weblog, an online diary of events. Blogging has evolved to encompass any kind of site that is regularly updated with posts. In fact, many sites that began as blogs are much better described as online magazines or specialist news sources. Some examples of these are Mashable and The Huffington Post.

A business blog is not really a blog, as they were originally perceived. It is more a news source for your customers and a way of increasing your reputation within your industry. It is a replacement for the company newsletter. If you have a business you should blog to share your knowledge, give your customers an insight into your expertise and encourage people to use your website as a source of industry news and insight.

Image source

If you use Twitter then you will no doubt have come across the Twitter Fail Whale:

This image is met by a number of emotions – derision, annoyance, frustration and fondness. The way in which Twitter has developed has meant that they have gone through periods where they can’t handle the quantity of traffic, so users are shown the whale. As with so many aspects of Twitter, it is the users who coined the term ‘Fail Whale’, rushing to other social media sites to discuss the fact that Twitter was down and what they would do. Such is the obsessiveness that users feel for the site that this image has become something of an icon.

Now other sites are trying emulate the success of failure, by attempting to create their own fail pages. Here is the fail page for the new Digg that I came across this morning:

I’m not convinced that Digg’s users have the same obsessive fondness to make this page iconic, but what other great fail pages are there?