More on blogging, some definitions

In my calls to prospective and present clients, I've offered to set-up and maintain a blog for them as part of my service offering. I have encountered a number who have not heard of the term Blog.

Just for the record, let's get a few terms defined here.

Blog is short for web log, a journal of posts that is located on the worldwide web. Someone who keeps a blog is a blogger; the process of keeping a blog is blogging. The world of blogs is called the blogosphere, the act of putting up a blog on a blog is posting.

Wikipedia defines a blog as "a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order." The description of what a blog is goes further:

"Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media."

More of this definition/description can be accessed on Wikipedia's site,">click here.

And, of course, blog jargon has evolved to come up with other terms and acronyms. Take CBO for instance. You have CEOs, CFOs, COOs, but a CBO? Yes, you guessed it, Chief Blogging Officer.

It's another world I suppose. And, face it, it's not going to go away. On the contrary, I'm one of those that believes that it's here to stay.

What do you think?

Some pointers on briefing for website design

Time is a commodity that is in very short supply for most people. And, I've found that my clients are no exceptions.

Working without a proper brief has been a fact of life for many years now and I've worked my way around this by filling in the blanks as much as possible. I take the attitude that it's better to take a communication job, be it an ad, a brochure or press release to the next stage ASAP.

Giving the client a word doc (for a press release), or a PDF for an ad or brochure, for him/her to look at is easier and gets the job done faster than waiting for a better brief, or more material to take a job to the next stage.

There are however some jobs that I just cannot take any further without a proper brief. One of these is the preparation website.

First of all, why do you need a website? What are you going to use this for? Who do you expect to influence? What message do you want to leave with them?

These are the first considerations for any brief for a communication piece. With a website, more things have to be considered.

After answering the above, one has to consider the content for inclusion. Will there be product brochures, flyers, maybe whole catalogues? How will these be grouped? Are they going to be in separate pages? What about photos?

As photos have to be optimised for the web, these have to be small in size for quick download. And, with the medium able to use JPEGs ( a lossy format), quality of the photos need not be super quality. (No out-of-focus shots, please.)

Also, considerations as to how often these have to be changed. Will the website be purely static? Are there any interactivity considerations? What about e-commerce?

There are a lot of other considerations covering search engine optimisation, meta tags and what about building a community, or a blog to be incorporated in the site.

As you can see, it's not just straight forward.

More on this in another blog.