ContentRobot

This is the final post in our series about building the Timex athlete blog. Today we want to focus on the blog’s design.

Business blogs should strive to have their own look-and-feel, yet they should be obviously branded (with the company logo, colors, etc.) and integrated into the rest of the company’s marketing materials.

For the Timex athlete blog, the goals were this:

• Sport the new company logo.
• To match the corporate web site’s color scheme: red, black, and grey.
• Take cues (for fonts, buttons, and other widgets) from the new marketing online and print campaigns.
• Show off the triathlon lifestyle using lots of pictures.
• Create a [...]

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Today we step back from the actual blog building and concentrate on developing a Blogging Policy Document for Timex’s athlete blog. ContentRobot discusssed the importance of developing such policies in a previous post. While, we won’t reveal its actual contents here, we’ll share some of the thought behind creating the policies.

Open Communication Company management must clearly state that they are behind the project and indicate how open they will allow the bloggers to communicate. Companies should get comfortable with people outside the public relations team writing about them. For those companies who are still squeamish, they can consider implementing a [...]

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Now that a lot of the technical groundwork has been laid, it’s time to focus on the content. What topics will the Timex blog cover? What will be important to the readers? Since the blog is all about the Timex-sponsored athletes, what kinds of content should be included?

The Taxonomy The taxonomy is basically a system of classification that describes the site’s contents as a whole. Blog categories help to define the topics, group the contents, and create relationships between the posts on the site. Approach the blog’s taxonomy like you would determine a web site’s site map.

As of [...]

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Next decision: what other software will Timex need to effectively manage its new blog?

Images ContentRobot recommended that Timex take advantage of Flickr professional account. At $24.95 a year, it is a steal to store and manage a bunch of athlete and event photos. By storing them in a common place, bloggers will be able to easily add any of these these images into their posts.

RSS Feed Tracking and Management One of the metrics that Timex needs to track is the blog’s RSS feeds. Feedburner will allow them to track the main RSS feed, athlete feeds, and event feeds. The statistics will [...]

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Next decision: what blogging platform would be best?

Recently, ContentRobot performed a head-to-head test of 2 popular software options - WordPress and Drupal. Since Timex has its own servers, hosting either of these platforms is a viable choice (among others out there). In any case, these platforms are both open source and free - we love that!

Option #1: WordPress WordPress has many fans - with good reason. It is simple to implement and you can enhance your blogging experience with a variety of plug-ins and design templates.

Option #2: Drupal Drupal is also great - ContentRobot’s blog-powered web site uses version [...]

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