In this age of web 2.0* every web team should have a blog.

Obviously anyone reading this is likely to understand what a blog is (if not, just so you know, you’re reading one!).

In the context of a web team, they’re a great way of sharing information and keeping a group of people up to date. More importantly for web teams, they are one of the most influential forces on web and web design today. Oh, and they also lie at the heart of all social media.

There’s nothing new to blogs – they’ve been around for a while now, received a load of publicity and it seems that these days almost everyone knows what they are. But how many people on your web team blog? Or have ever blogged? Do you know what it takes to get one up and running or keep it going? Do you know what works and what doesn’t?

The simplest way to find out is to try one, and it couldn’t be easier to set one up. If you don’t have the resources in-house there are plenty of free ones that you can use.

Instead of bombarding your web team with emails of information, post it to the blog and let them read it in their own time. Encourage them to post and comment too. Depending on how closely you work, you’ll find that it becomes a secondary intranet (or the primary intranet).

At the same time as helping web teams share and collaborate, individuals will get a much greater understanding of blogging and the blogosphere (unless they are already active participants, in which case you probably already have one).

If you want to be really brave you could leave it open to the public and see if you can build an audience.

For the 5 minutes that it takes to set one up, it makes absolutely no sense for any web team not to have one. If you’re so far into social media that blogs are now passé, or your web team is less than 3, you’re excused, but for the rest of you stop reading this and go set one up. This should get you going in the right direction:

Or if you want some software to set up your own in house:

* Why does everyone say “o”? It’s zero, naught or even cipher but not an o (as in oh). O is a letter.

Ok, the pendent will get back into the self-administered box and shut up.

Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 3:35 pm | Categories: web teams

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One comment on “Why every web team should have a blog”

I agree and will get one set up pronto. Our team spends a lot of time sharing links and ideas via email and using a blog instead is a helluva lot more efficient. Another thing we also started doing was using del.icio.us to share bookmarks.

Leave a Reply