Business Blogs (multiple blogs; multiple authors) – Best Practice
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Is there a best practice for supporting multiple blogs that I as IT Support for a law firm need to administer? Our law firm has several authors who want to blog about their own specialties. I initially helped create a site, under the main blogger name, that now has about 5 authors. I am a 2nd administrator on that site. And now I’ve been requested to create another blog for another group (and there may be more coming). We are feeding blogs into our main website. What do you recommend as best practice? I am not experienced with wordpress.com.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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This is just my own opinion, not necessarily the “best practice,” but if it’s all one law firm, it might be best if it’s all one blog. One way to handle that is to decide on “Categories” for the different topics and groups, and assign the appropriate Category to each post. There’s a widget that shows Categories, so visitors can click on the one that interests them to see the posts of interest to them.
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<Opinion>
There is also an Author Widget – use that also – then people can find all the Posts by one person
</Opinion>
On the good side – WordPress.COM is very flexible and easy to change if you decide you want to sort or arrange things different after a whle – and the Categories and Authors can be used to mix match and dice and slice – Tags can also be used to help fine tune how things are sorted
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Thanks for the tips on categories, authors & widgets. We’re using a bit of that in the multiple author site (tnconstruction-law.com). However, our first two bloggers either had their own site already or wanted to “own” their site (customized domains, template, etc.). So now we have 3 separate sites and more to come. So I suppose for now we’ll need to keep on as we started with the individual formats and owners and I’ll just have to keep track. If we grow anymore I’ll request a revisit of the one blog scenario as that was our initial recommendation to the firm. Thanks again for your responses.
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Does this help you? Multi-Author WordPress.com Blogs
I think you ought to consider hiring a web host and setting up WordPress multisuer platform of your own with a Jetpack and buddpress plugins.
WordPress MU is no longer under active development as a separate product. Its features were rolled into core and released with WordPress 3.0. You can simply proceed by Installing WordPress and Create A Network instead. It functions generally the same. http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_MU
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For the ones that want to “Own their site” – you can do something like a Reblog on the site you are setting up for the firm –
or you can have the title of their Post with the first paragraph then a link to their Post on their blog – then people can still go to the one site and see what everyone in the firm is writing then visit the other blogs to read the full article – they see the page view on their blog and the company master site shows that wide range of experience in the firm and people don’t need to wander around looking for the different blogs
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I think all of that is a PITA that can be avoided by doing what I suggested here ie. install WordPress.org software and create a network > https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/business-blogs-multiple-blogs-multiple-authors-best-practice?replies=6#post-1476958
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Thanks all, I’ll review and assimilate your suggestions and the documentation. Will take awhile to chew on this! For now, I’ll mark topic as resolved.
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timethief, if I upgrade my personal wordpress.com account to premium, can I then create the premium blogs for the new blogging requests I receive using each one’s preferred domain name and template? Or can I take us all to a Business account and create separate blogs with unique domains? At present, they do not want to combine into one blog with multiple authors. As you can see I’m not clear on my options.
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timethief, if I upgrade my personal wordpress.com account to premium, can I then create the premium blogs for the new blogging requests I receive using each one’s preferred domain name and template?
No. There is no upgrade that will accomplish that. Upgrades apply to the blog URL they are purchased for.
I recommend that you hire a web host and install WordPress.org software and create a network as described here https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/business-blogs-multiple-blogs-multiple-authors-best-practice?replies=6#post-1476958
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And tell ALL of your contributors to use Windows Live Writer. I know they’ll want to write in Word, but for many, many technical reasons that’s a bad idea. WLW works very much like Word, but is easier since you can add categories, tags, images, media, and formatting while still working offline, and then it just uploads it at the touch of a button.
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* If we decide to host the blog ourselves we have software and a webhost to use; so for now we’ll keep on as we are with individual WP accounts. Just more overhead for me but that’s not unusual. [I did read the topic link, the first time, and it was not an answer for us.]
* Had never heard of Windows Live Writer. Will take a look and decide if helpful for our folks.
Thanks again all and this time I’m really signing off this topic.
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