Priority: RSS

There is a lot of debate on what blogging is. Some of the old school web designers tend to call them articles. That's ok, as long as you have them set right. What I mean by set right, is when you have a basic html website, whether its on Blogger, Joomla, WordPress, or hosted on your own server, you should always make sure you don't blog on pages that are third or fourth level in the file tree.  If you have important content on those levels, submit them to your sitemap.

RSS only goes two levels down in your website files. Your file structure on your site should be well organized, with all images on the root level folder named "images". Your RSS or Atom feed for a blog or site feeds should be set up on your home page or second level page designated for your blogroll.  This is where you content should be consistent, relevant, interesting, informational, full of anchor text for SEO and images to keep it visually interesting.

If you set up your blogroll on a third or more level of files in your site, your feed will only pull the title of the pages/articles and not the content. RSS and Atom feeds are extremely helpful for those who use feed readers, those that use feed to tweet and share your content to social viral networks.

How do you know if a site has feed? Most of them have the RSS or Atom icons. But for those that may not, you can install the RSS Subscription Extension (by Google) for Chrome.

This handy tool helps you to also subscribe to any RSS you might find on the web. There is a plethora of tools to help you share your content on the web via your RSS feed. Facebook has them, Tweet-adder has them, Twitter has them, WordPress, and a ton more.

If you do web design professionally, and clean basic look is your direction, just make sure your RSS is set to pull the right content. You could potential 50% of your repeat followers without it.

The Wordpress World

Now that I am done with series one of Dreamweaver..they just updated it to CS5.5!  The new things there are adding to the software are pretty incredible!!

In the meantime, I have a client that is interested in Wordpress.  Wordpress, for the most part, is a template based platform.  As much as I dislike restrictive formats, the plug-ins are pretty impressive.  It's the getting to know the biology of Wordpress and how it all works together. 

The framework is well founded..and there are some not so free themes that are already search engine optimized.  That is a huge thing when building a website.  As I said before, no matter what your site looks like, no matter the format, if it's not optimized, you don't matter to Google, Yahoo or Bing! So, with great ambition and patience, I am venturing into the Wordpress world and playing with my own little site. 

Did you know you can build a social network all within your Wordpress site? And some just think they are blogs! Not so! If you can dream it..you can build it in Wordpress..and at a cost.  The upside is it's already set up and the apps and plug-ins are easy to "Plug-in".  Most of the templates, plug-ins, add-ons, etc..are created by folks like you and me who just wanted something that fitted their needs for their sites.  And they did an incredible job. 

Got any great tutorial links for Wordpress? Send them to me!