Bloggers are only using half the power of blogging software - if that. The vast majority of people writing blogs are simply typing up their latest musings and adding them to a blog that is not even part of their main web site.

Indeed, the vast majority of blogs do not even look like the main web site, instead using a template provided by the blog software company, such as Blogger or WordPress. However, blogging software is merely a content management system, so it opens up many more possibilities for your web site. So here's how to use blogging software to run your entire web site.

1. Host your blog at a separate domain name
Do not host your blog at blogspot or at some blogging hosting service. Get a domain name for your blog. By doing so you will be showing that your blog is a serious player. There are also some search engine optimisation benefits if you do this.

2. Avoid using blog templates
Either design your own web pages or get a designer to do this for you. Then insert the code from your blogging software provider to turn your design into a blog. Blogger, for instance, does not give much publicity to designing blogs using its "classic tags" system. But by doing so you just need to enter a few lines of code into your web design and it becomes a blog.

3. Create a separate blog for each section of your web site
If you create a separate blog for each section of your web site you can use it to divide up your material. It also means you can update any section of your web site from anywhere in the world without needing specialist software.

That's it - just three steps to content management for your web site using blogging software. As an example, take a look around my revamped site. Each of the first three sections are different blogs. The home page has my daily articles. The Internet tips section has several short snippets of useful information and the In Depth section has longer articles.

All three of these sections are separate blogs run using Blogger's system. The design for the pages was done in Microsoft Expression Web. All I had to do was design the pages, add the Blogger tags to the design and then upload the HTML code produced to Blogger.com to replace the templatee Blogger had given me.

Labels: blogging

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