Wordcamp IL 2008: Your Next Web Site Will Be a Blog

Ultimately, the reason I went to Wordcamp was Hanan Cohen’s talk “Your Next Web Site Will Be a Blog”. It was insightful, which is not surprising as Hanan strikes me as one of people who know that most about the place where NGOs meet the web.

The message was that blogging platforms (specifically, WordPress) can be used to build a pretty web site quickly and cheaply by non-techies (anyone who can open a Gmail account and send an email with an attachment, to use Hanan’s words).

I have a little experience with NGOs web presence. It’s complicated, expensive and frustrating for everyone involved. Starting a blog on a web site like Blogli or WordPress.com is cheap (free, in fact), but more importantly, you work gradually. You start with one page (that is, one post) and see how things evolve. You don’t have to make complex decisions or come up with a lot of content up-front.

A blog can actually predate the organization. 3 people with an idea and no money can start a blog as one of the first steps to create and organization.

Or even if the NGO already has a web site, a blog may be used for one event or project.

I think the core of the message was that the NGO people can and should do that themselves. This way they can control, update, fix their blog themselves, or even get rid of it if it doesn’t work. Crucially, this way they learn to understand the medium better, to the profit of their organizations and to their personal profit. They will come better equipped to their next “full” web site construction project.

I am pretty convinced myself. Maybe less so for an organization with an existing site, unless it’s totally crappy: there’s a value in keeping all the organization’s information in one place, rather than starting confusing people (and Google) with multiple addresses. Certainly as a first step towards web presence.