The idea for our blog came from the results of a Google search for alpha launch. There, I came across a rich blog post, How do we announce the alpha launch? The casual tone combined with thorough lists resonated with me. It felt like I was discovering my own notes from one of my projects (I wish saved lists like this).
While reading Onista’s blog post I began to feel that the challenges and experiences we’re encountering as we build A Lending Hand are likely shared by others on the internet. Reading Onista’s blog I felt connected to the Onista project and seeing comments on the Onista blog I felt that I was reading a valuable internet conversation.
In deciding to pen the day to day tasks and challenges that we’re encountering within A Lending Hand, we had to also decide how and where we would publish our blog.
Blogging Options:
Subdomain such as blog.alendinghand.com
Subdirectory such as alendinghand.com/blog/
External Hosting such as alendinghand.wordpress.com
What are the pros and cons of using a subdomain?
PROS:
- blog.alendinghand.com is an intuitive location for a blog about alendinghand.com.
- software installed on our subdomain will not interfere with any software on our domain.
- Google will count links from our subdomain to our domain as external links.
- we keep alendinghand.com in our domain name (instead of going with an externally hosted solution like wordpress.com).
CONS:
- Google sees the subdomain as an entirely different website.
- links to and page rank merit accrued by blog.alendinghand.com will not directly benefit alendinghand.com.
Off the bat, I liked the idea of blog.alendinghand.com. The goals for this business blog are to post about our process and not so much about the content of A Lending Hand. While we won’t be building link merit for alendinghand.com, we will be increasing A Lending Hand’s presence on the web and that feels in line with our goals for this blog.
We’re excited to be sharing all that we’re coming across as we build aLendingHand.com.
blog.aLendingHand.com is our official ‘behind the scenes’ blog. Here you’ll be able to get the inside scoop on all that is aLendingHand.com.