Perhaps you’ve never thought of it. But,you back up the files on your computer, right? Because — just as anything that’s paper can be burned or ruined in a flood, anything digital can fail.

I remember the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when a friend told me that the external hard drive that housed his archive of photographs had died, taking all his work with it.

But what about your website? No doubt your hosting provider creates periodic backups as a normal business practice. Is that good enough?

I would argue: no. As reliable and considerate as your provider may be, there’s nothing like having an archive of your current site within your direct control. Like having a certified copy of your birth certificate, it just feels better having that in your own safe deposit box. Halls of records do suffer catastrophes. Disasters occur.

Okay, so how often?

This can easily be determined: how often does your website change?

• When do you add new articles or pictures?
• Do you have a forum or active comments area?
• Is your site a store that houses records of orders and customer contact information?

If your website is a very quiet one and you post a new article every other week, you risk nothing by doing your backups twice monthly.

What can you risk losing? What is your strategy? Do you know how often your server-managing host provider backs up, should you not opt to do your own backups? What procedure exists should your site become compromised? Are there extra costs involved?

Knowing the answer to these questions helps you be a successful and professional manager of your website.

The word “blog” comes from its base “web log” and this gives a clue to its general structure: a list of entries or records, organized by date, with the most recent “log” (post, entry) appearing at the top.

Blogs became a popular (and probably the dominant) format for web publishing a bit after the turn of the century. Before that, it seems most websites were more static. That is, they were more like posters that someone pastes to a wall — with some text and graphics, on a topic: “There it is. Read it. That’s all I have to say.”

Blogs are more lively. They vary, almost as much as one person differs from another, and the entries can take any number of forms.

In the intervening decade, we have photoblogs, editorial blogs, informational blogs, product blogs, microblogging (Twitter, etc.), “curated” blogging (where one just collects others’ content, typically — like Tumblr and Pinterest).

Blogs can also be more interactive and conversational. If you choose, you can invite comment, and these comments become an addendum — a follow-up discussion — that enhances the original post (blog entry).

Frameworks

As you might expect, you don’t have to start with bare ground to blog. There’ve been a goodly selection of both hosted and self-hosted options that give you a structured framework to “put stuff in.”

Hosted solutions are a bit like renting an apartment: if the owner decides to sell or knock down the building, you’re out of luck. I think LiveJournal is still going; Vox (which was great), not so much.

That leaves self-hosted options, where you (or your web professional) installs and configures the blog framework on your own hosting account. It’s flexible — you’re not tied to a single host provider — and if you’re foresightful, you choose a framework that’s well-supported and robust. Lots of times these frameworks are called “CMS”s (content management systems), but that’s a whole different discussion we’ll come back to later. Even here, options abound.

WordPress

Let’s stick with one: WordPress. It’s possibly the most broadly used and is both well-supported (and regularly updated) as well as offering, with each new version, more flexibility and ease of use.

We’ll dive more into WordPress’s myriad gifts later. Keeping to our goal of providing a “simple overview,” these are the basic components of WordPress:

• Posts: where WordPress is being its bloggy self. Posts are individual publications (whether one sentence or 15 paragraphs) that are displayed, typically, one after the other, with the most recent one at the top/beginning. (This article is a “post.”)
  • Posts typically share a distinction in that they are graced with “categories” so that your reader, who may be interested in your views on vegetable gardening, doesn’t have to muck through your observations on favored home building materials. This also gives a logical structure to your site, so it’s less chaotic, and is a boon to search engines (who revel in labels and “taxonomy” [fancy word for organizing by labels]).
• Pages: where you break with the blog mold. I don’t think the first iterations of WordPress (back with it was “B2″) had this type of structure. But Pages are handy. They’re where you can provide more static and unchanging — think reference sort of material. It might be an “About Us” Page or the like. They aren’t as plentiful as their Post cousins, but they serve a purpose, since — if there were only Posts, your “About Us” post would get buried back at the beginning of your blog structure in no time.

Advisory: I am being very general here. WordPress offers a dizzying array of options. But keeping these two sorts of publications (Posts and Pages) in mind, along with what makes them distinct, will lead to a more rewarding and less frustrating  experience.

Twitter is probably my favourite social media avenue. I’ve been on it since about a year after its inception, and though it has its limitations (notably the 140 character limit), it’s flexible and powerful.

If you’re starting a new enterprise and are just signing up for a new Twitter account, the first thing you must decide is your username or “handle” — your identity on Twitter.

The keys are relevance, brevity, and towering above all else: it must be pithy.

My dictionary describes pithy as:
2. (of language or style) terse and vigourously expressive

So, here’s your task. What best describes you in a dozen characters or less? (The limitation to 12 characters at maximum is a bit arbitrary, but remember that every tweet — and those much-desired retweets — will carry the weight of your username, so be kind and be brief.)

• Your name? Should you go with @firstnamelastname – your first and last name run together? Or @firstinitiallastname – your initials and last name?

This works great or a lot of professionals whose name is their identity. From @rickygervais to @chrisbrogan to @richardengel — their names are, in their fields, how they are known.

• Your domain? If your domain name is greatwidgets.com – perhaps you choose @greatwidgets

This is a good choice if you’re domain name isn’t uncomfortably long. It works well for @brainpicker and @mashable and @vanityfair and is a common solution to the question of Twitter ID.

But they got there first!

This is the downside of coming late to the Twitter party. As happened recently with a client, if some young woman in Brazil chose your domain name (let’s pretend it’s redrose.com) because it struck her fancy to be @redrose, and even though it’s been three years since she’s posted to Twitter, it’s still hers. You have to get creative.

So maybe you choose: @myredrose or @sendaredrose or @redroseinc or @TheRedRose … you get the idea. You can make this annoyance a strength by using @sendaredrose — if your business is sending red roses.

The Irish Independent ( independent.ie ) uses the quite acceptable Twitter handle @TheSundayIndo which is meaningful, brief, and descriptive.

Are you local?

If you serve a limited area, it might be useful to work that into your Twitter username. For example if you are a dog-centric service that operates in Boise, you could go with @boisebowwow, which is fun and memorable, even if your domain name is something like boisedogservices.com.

Need some ideas?

Start with your domain name. Make it brief. Is it meaningful? What short words describe the crux of your business or service? Get out a piece of paper and go wild with ideas.

Now, get on your web browser and start throwing your favourites into the address field: twitter.com/MYGREATIDEA (where ‘MYGREATIDEA’ is your idea for a Twitter name). This is a great way to see if your idea for a Twitter username is already taken.

Are you a design client and need some feedback? I’m happy to work with you on this. Let me know in our Project Tracker blog or send me an email.

Your website is your open door. Through it you can speak to your colleagues, your friends, the public at large. What a wonderful opportunity for two-way communication. One of the great joys of the Internet is engaging in conversations with people you’d typically never meet. Distance, circles of acquaintance are much less relevant.

Unfortunately, this open door is often spotted by the opportunitists. The self-seekers who have no interest in meaningful contact and may even be malicious. I’m talking here about comment spam.

It’s ubiquitous and it will always be with us, like mosquitos, rats, and cockroaches.

In the WordPress environment, like most of my more recent clients utilize, there are several options. I’ll mention just a couple here, and save more for a later post.

WordPress itself has settings under the Settings > Discussion area of the Dashboard that allow for limiting a comment free-for-all. Most checkboxes are self-explanatory, so see what you think. I do recommend you close comments on articles after a week or two, most certainly.

Every install comes with a Plugin called Akismet. This is not free (though the price is reasonable) so it probably wasn’t activated during your project. Instead, I very likely installed BadBehavior which is “donation-ware” and does a quite nice job of catching suspicious comments.

That still leaves you the job of sifting through these pending comments as they sit in limbo. What sort of things are the hallmarks of disingenuous communication? (Be sure and look in the text of their return email and any link text as well as their “message.”)

• Any mention of celebrity/popular clothing designers
• Any mention of “cheap” or “bargain” anything
• Any mention of cigarettes, prescription medication, or other drugs
• Magic SEO. (I’ll get you listed at the top of Google.)
• Nonsense alphabetic strings in text or email address or URLs (web links)
• Non sequiturs. You’re writing about apples and their comment discusses oranges.

Recognize that most text will be generic congratulatory fluff. I pity the poor sods grinding away, working for the spammers, that have to sit and type all this garbage for hours. But don’t let them ruin your website.

Let me know if you have any questions. I welcome your (genuine!) comments :)