A blog, short for weblog, is a type of webpage designed to be updated with new content very regularly. If you plan to have a webpage with a limited number of pages, let’s say 6, a blog isn’t going to be necessary.

You would create a single page with 6 links to pages 1,2,3,4,5 and 6. You would then replicate that page 6 times, change the content for each page and your website would be complete. If later you decided you wanted a 7th page you would have to open each of those 6 pages and add the link to page 7.

Doing this once obviously isn’t much of a problem, but what if you plan to regularly add new pages? If you are going to be regularly publishing articles, like I do on my graphic design site here, you would have to add a link to this new page from every page, every time.

Imagine your 10th article, your 20th, 50th and so on. Obviously this would be become extremely time consuming and eventually impossible.

A blog is a database driven website, this might sound complicated and daunting by its not, I promise. The advantage is that everything is completely automated, when a new page is added new links are added in all the necessary places automatically.

On the right side of this page you will see all the categories I publish articles about and the latest 5 articles in each category. When a new article is added, I simply type the copy into the webpage and it is added to the top of its particular category, the article at the bottom is then knocked off the list. This is applied across the whole website without having to do any additional work at all.

The site also creates an archive of these older posts which can then be viewed by category or date, this too is automatic. These posts, and all current posts are also searchable. In the same way you use google to find pages on the internet, you can search to find pages on the site alone. Searching in this fashion is not possible within a static html site.

A static html webpage is also strictly 1 way, while a blog allows your visitors to leave comments on all your posts, an online conversation between you and your visitors if you will. This also has the handy little side benefit of adding content to your site.

Start your blogging!

If you have blog you may also be interested in these wordpress plug-ins to improve your site.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is critical for the discovery of your site. Below are some important factors to consider when creating your webpage.

The golden rule: Dont’ cheat!

In searching for ways to improve your page rank you have probably already discovered suggestions such as;

• creating 100 periods on each page linking to major sites
• putting 100 keywords in the same colour as your background
• tagging your whole site as H1
• And so on…

All these suggestions are of course rubbish. Many years ago this may have been the case, today however this will get you no where, and more likely damage the your sites discovery chances.

The ever so smart people at Google are forever working on ways to counter these types of behaviors. Spend your time creating genuine content, not wasting it cheating. This deception will be discovered, and your site discarded.

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Here’s a few of the new puntastic postcard series from Harvey Nichols. The series is based of food celebrities and features the likes of Cake Winslet, Banana Mouskouri, Pea Diddy and more. Here’s a few few examples.

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I’m sure your all seen or asked someone what graphic design is, and gotten the response “uh… well it’s… um…”.

To help clear the waters, here are some of my favorites from veerle’s what is graphic design? poster competition, with some fantastic examples of what graphic design really is.

1st place, Juanma Teixidó.

2nd place, Gravity Machine (my favorite)

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You’ve no doubt seen in your travels around the internet, various webpages offering RSS subscriptions, if you didn’t know what they were you soon will. Above is little video from commoncraft explaining exactly what an RSS feed in.

In short, an RSS feed is a great time saver, allowing to you to subscribe to the latest news from all your favorites websites which offer the service (including this one, wink wink).

Additionally, as a blog operator it’s the best way to get regular updates to your regular readers. Enjoy.