Puffbox

In this week’s Soapbox piece, I wrote ‘what is a blog, if it isn’t a basic ‘content management’ application?‘ These days, as blogging platforms get smarter, the divide between ‘blog’ and ‘CMS’ is disappearing. Rapidly.

What makes Blogger or WordPress any less suitable than something like six- or seven-figure megaproducts like Vignette or Stellent? I’m not for one minute suggesting that the big-boy CMS products don’t come with extra functionality. But, when you consider the full cost, from purchase to implementation to ongoing maintenance, not to mention the time it takes to get them up – are you getting value for the extra money?

Take Blogger: if you’re comfortable with HTML, you’ll find it dead easy to design your own templates, including all the bits you want, and removing all the bits you don’t. So if you don’t want it to look like a blog, it doesn’t have to. WordPress goes a step further, letting you build hierarchies of ‘pages’, but designing and customising pages is a bit trickier. With both products, you get all the usual blog functions ‘out of the box’ – just as big corporate sites are trying to graft them onto their legacy systems.

As an example, have a look at world music magazine, Fly.co.uk. It certainly doesn’t look like a blog, but look a bit closer. The filenames are the real giveaway.