At Future Access, we have long discussed the merits of having a blog on our own website. As a web development company, we often advise our clients to keep their websites fresh by starting a blog and regularly posting new content to it.
There are lots of reasons to have a blog. It is a great way to keep customers engaged and returning to the website. It can give customers a peek inside your organization and allows you to be more personal than you would on the content pages of the site. From an SEO perspective, search engines love new, updated content. Having a blog is a great way to improve your ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more.
So, after 20 years as a professional website design company, why didn’t Future Access have a blog until now? The simple answer is, we didn’t trust ourselves to give it the attention it needs to be done well.
We can be fairly self-reflective around here, and we like to think we have a reasonably accurate understanding of our own strengths and weaknesses. For example, we do our very best to build cool, amazing websites for our clients that follow (and even lead) the latest trends. However, we also understand that left-brained website programmers that understand PHP code inside and out and right-brained graphic designers that worry about pixels lining up perfectly and which type of a serif font to use are not always the coolest people in the room. We have quite a few geek jokes, and we play video games for team-building exercises, but we’re confident and self-assured in knowing who we are.
In other words, we know ourselves well enough to know that we wouldn’t keep a blog up to date. You see, there can be a bit of a “Shoemaker’s Children” syndrome around here when it comes to our own website. Just as the shoemaker was so busy making shoes for his customers and keeping them happy that his own children went barefoot, we have often been so busy working on websites for our clients that we have not had time to enhance and update our own. Despite how we have preached for ages how a website is the cornerstone of any business’ marketing strategy, we have, at times, neglected our own.
As much as a blog is a great way to keep a website feeling fresh and current, a stale blog quickly makes a website feel old and dated. If the most recent blog post is over a year old, and the blog only has a flurry of activity in the month or so after it was launched, it will look far worse than not having a blog at all. Usually, we recommend posting the headlines of the most recent blog posts on the homepage, which would only exacerbate this issue by pointing out to everyone that you aren’t paying any attention to your own website.
So now we are finally taking the great big blog plunge. However, we continue to be self-aware and we don’t want to have stlog (a term we just coined for “stale blog”). So, we’re taking it slow. But we’re going for it.
Get ready world, the Future Access team is putting our money where our mouth is. Here comes the brand new, better-late-than-never, no-turning-back now, Future Access Blog!