Once there were sites…
I was just thinking… once we had sites, now we had blogs. What has changed in 2-3 years?
We have experienced at least three transitions:
- sites
- portals
- blogs
Not a long time ago anybody wanting to make an online enterprise had to build a site: that meant that people had to buy a WYSIWYG editor - or just write plain HTML code - and continue to update pages in order to sell their products, promote their ideas or sell services.
If you had no graphical skills or good taste, the output could be horrible, in the best case.
Then it was the time of "portals", such as PHPNuke: everybody had access to an easier way to maintain his/her site, and people could somehow interact with it. Very few sites built around this technologies had a lasting success, since it was rather difficult for people to understand what to do, how to interact, where to find contents. I’ve always hated them.
Now it is the time of blogs: almost everybody has one, and user-interaction is far easier. Blogs also have the advantage of having nice skins, but unless you personalize them you will get not a very nice and unique out-of-the-box experience.
The main problem of a blog - but also of any other site built upon any other technology - is content. Unless you present your users updated content, the blog won’t be read by anybody. But I’ll dig into this matter later on.
