Alice

Websites are not the same throughout the world. Apparently in Europe they are mainly what we call ?static? websites, online business brochures, somewhere the visitor can confirm a business after a networking experience or a referral. They do not interact with their visitors, and many are on the way to becoming obsolete because they do not compete with the whizz-bang websites from the States.

America has taken on the interactive website by storm. There are so many different kinds of CMS (content management systems) that allow the owners to update the contents themselves without having to rely on a webmaster to do it for them, and also allow the visitors to contribute their comments and ideas to the website with immediate publishing effect.

Blogs are a form of CMS website. They are extremely easy to maintain, and positively encourage visitors to interact with them. Their programming is extremely enticing to search engine spiders, who crawl the internet looking for new material to feast on, and blogs are a plentiful supply of fresh content. They are designed to be updated on a regular basis (from several times a day to once a week), and even the visitors who comment on them are considered to be fresh spider meat.

This constant new content is exaggerated by the social sharing sites (Digg, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc) who rely on computer techies who have nothing better to do than to read tonnes of blogs and share them with their pals. The more interaction you get from these sites, the more visitors, comments, spider interaction and ultimately higher indexing by the search engines. And the sharing concept is continued on ordinary social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), with retweeting and feeding galore, all with a ready supply of new content to spread across the internet.

Static websites do absolutely nothing for the businesses they represent, apart from looking pretty with out-of-date material, and only visited when someone types in their URL and bothers to get past the first page. Blogs and other CMS websites are perfectly tuned towards getting passing search engine traffic, continuously being updated with new stuff that is worthwhile reading, interacting with their readers and social media ? actually being a presence on the internet that surpasses their expenditure and actually gets in business without having to try really hard.

Now which one would you prefer to represent you business?