Online Business Blog
Posted Tuesday, December 23, 2008 by Jason Gergely
When I hear the phrase "Online Business Blog" I think of a kind of journal that business professionals use to accomplish several different things. First, they do this to get the word out better about their company, what it has to offer, and how it can benefit you. Secondly, these business professionals are trying to express their feelings on your company. It can be a kind of like a journal but can be seen by anyone that wants to see. By allowing these employees to write posts, they can express themselves about the company and their job, and of course, since there is a content manager, the information put on your company website, will for sure be within your (or your administrator's) control.

Because an it is online, your blog MUST be attached to your company website. What good would a it do if it were not even attached to your website? It is completely ineffective if you don't. By attaching your blog to your website, you are helping with an easy transition from information search to sale of product or service. Basically what I am saying is LINK YOUR BLOG AND YOUR WEBSITE TOGETHER!

If you want to get more information on blogs for employees, look at Compendium's website. You can get information on the service as well as examples of how to set it up!

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Subdomain vs Subdirectory: Which is better for SEO?
Posted Wednesday, December 17, 2008 by Douglas Karr
This is a follow-up to my first post on Why host on a subdomain versus a subdirectory.

Matt Cutts of Google has some interesting feedback on this, and promotes the use of a subdirectory due to the complexities involved in subdomain configuration.  I believe that when you're blogging for business and tracking conversions, the advantages of a subdomain become a bit clearer.
  1. Organizing subdomains used to be difficult but is now pretty mainstream in hosting administration panels.
  2. Utilizing subdomains opens you up to utilize third party Software as a Service applications that are best suited to do the job.  Delegating your email subdomain to an email service provider, for example, is a great way to monitor and maintain your email reputation.
  3. A subdomain can be pointed anywhere, internally or externally, providing you a lot more flexibility in moving your blog between providers or changing your website's content management system, etc. without impacting each.
  4. Most importantly, utilization of a subdomain allows you to control, monitor and adjust your corporate blogging strategy seperate than your other marketing initiatives.
If you start a business blog, I still believe that hosting the blog on a subdomain is a best practice.
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CMS Systems
Posted Thursday, December 11, 2008 by Jason Gergely
CMS stands for Content Management System. What a CMS system does it manages content by collaborating data. It eases the management of data. We can use them to create, manage, edit as well as publish content, such as blogs. A CMS can help organize your data, and keep track of your posts.

Some company websites use this type of system to help organize their website. For instance, a company has their main website, and then has subpages under this umbrella. What it does it gives the specific departments a free range of adding information, while maintaining a similar look across the entire website.

It makes it easier in the long run for designing websites. If the website has a small error or something that needs to be changed, you don't have to go back to the web designer because you can do it yourself
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Content is the New Way to Market
Posted Thursday, December 11, 2008 by Kristen Raves
With so many advertisements being shoved down our throats every day, businesses are finding new and innovative ways to market their products and services.  Pop up banners, newspaper ads, and Pay Per Click advertising just does not work the same way it used to.  Marketing through blogging is a common way for the average customer to find you and purchase your products and/or services.

The common consumer just ignores those flashy ads.  People are so bombarded with these tactics that it means nothing to them.  By having a blog content management system such as Compendium Blogware, everyone in your organization can share their thoughts and opinions.  From the CEO to a customer service representative, it is important that these individuals are writing about what it is that their organization has to offer. 

By having a platform to share these ideas, it makes it easier for your company to be found in the search engines.  Let's face it, not as many people actually click on those paid searches anymore.  So why not market in the organic search results?  Most companies are worried about how they are going to market in this tough economy. To that we say, blog.  It is a cost efficient and easy way to promote your company in its best light.  It gives you the ability to write content that focuses on what your company does and the solutions that you can provide to your potential customers.

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Protecting the Data is a Priority
Posted Sunday, November 30, 2008 by PJ Hinton
Erich Schonfeld has a post at Tech Crunch about how Facebook recently experienced a data loss that resulted in evaporation of its user's e-mail notification preferences.  He takes comfort in the fact that it was a loss that should provide only a minor, and short-lived, annoyance to users, but he also notes that had the preference been something that regarded privacy settings, the results could have been much worse.

As a developer, I have an idea of what might have happened in the data loss.  I wouldn't want to be the person who was responsible for the data loss.  It's good that we see these stories because it's a sobering reminder of the dangers of working with live data.

Almost every web-based application has to persist data.  Facebook stores profile information in addition to preferences.  E-mail services store messages and the preferences that govern the behavior of the application's user interface.  Content management applications (blogs included) store posts, comments, and page layout information.

Usually this data goes into a relational database management system (RDBMS) like MySQL, MS SQL Server, or Oracle.  But performance issues have led some to question the database design best practices that have been in use over the past two or three decades.  Others have one so far as to speculate that RDBMSes may be so ill suited to some data persistence uses that one should consider using something else.

Regardless, the data you submit to a web application gets poked into some means of persistence, and then later on it is read by the application for generating pages (like this blog post) or making a decision (like whether to notify an administrator immediately when a blog post has been submitted for approval).

The world is neither perfect nor static.  Sometimes a bug in an application can result in the creation of bogus database entries.  It's not enough to stop the application from doing that again, it's also important to determine if the damaged data can be repaired.  If the damage is on the order of hundreds or thousands of items, a script may need to be created to repair the damage.

Here is where things can get dangerous.  Repair scripts sometimes need to make destructive changes (i.e. SQL DELETE statements) to a table.  It is very important for the script's author to have an understanding not only of the table being modified but also any quirks in the semantics of column entries. 

For example, rows created early in the application's history may not have stored ID values for certain types of entries.  When these things are not taken into account, a repair script may inadvertently delete rows that may not be valid in current application usage but are still essential pieces of data.

When things like this happen it's not always obvious that something has gone wrong in the application.  For the most part things may work fine, but then all of the sudden people notice that information on certain pages is missing.

Times like this, it's nice to have a backup of the database from which to restore the lost data.  My guess is that the Facebook development team decided that the loss was not severe enough to perform the recovery.  On the other hand, if the decision was based on the lack of a recent backup to restore from, then shame on them.

Here at Compendium, we devoted a code review a couple months back to developing some standards and best practices for writing database repair and maintenance scripts.  This helped us to move from an ad hoc patchwork of scripting styles to a more consistent, reliable, and reusable body of code.  Some of the guidelines that emerged from those discussions:
  • Proposed database schema changes should be vetted by all members of the engineering team.  Once agreed upon, the system engineering team needs to be notified of these changes so that backup scripts can be adjusted.
  • Environment settings (e.g. production or development) should be specifiable from the script's command line arguments and then determined programmatically by the framework if not specified there.  There should be no hard coding of these values.
  • If there are model classes or data access objects that can be used to manipulate the data, the script should use these rather than using hand crafted SQL strings.
  • One-time use scripts should be named after the work item number that they were created for.  Multiple use scripts should be flexible to handle a wide number of use situations, named for the tasks they perform.
  • All repair and maintenance scripts should be placed under revision control.
These guidelines help us to ensure that when things need to be fixed or reconfigured, they are done with minimal risk to the data.
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Compendium Blogware is Hiring
Posted Wednesday, November 19, 2008 by Chris Baggott
We are growing quickly and need some more business development people to help us handle all of our inbound leads.   Corporate Blogging is hot because in it marketers have a tool that not only has high ROI, but equally high engagement.  If you know anyone who is looking to start a great career with a software as a service company serving business large and small...please have them contact us.

Business Development Manager

A Business Development Manager identifies, manages, and closes new business opportunities for Compendium Software.

A Business Development Manager must be articulate, persuasive, and able to develop and close a large pipeline of business within a short period of time. In addition, the Business Development Manager must be a self-starter who can roll up his or her sleeves and implement key selling initiatives.  

Responsibilities include:

•    Manage sales planning, forecasting, and analysis activities within our internal CRM system
•    Manage sales opportunities throughout the sales cycle, with online demos, phone calls, email communications, and more.
•    Maintain high activity level with prospects.
•    Generate additional business opportunities through dedicated prospecting and cold-calling.
•    Meet and exceed all quarterly and annual sales goals.

Qualifications:

•    Excellent oral and written communication skills.
•    Thorough understanding of MS Office applications and Internet.
•    Ability to work independently in a fast pace, rapid change environment.
•    Receptiveness to local and national travel.
•    Ability to negotiate skillfully in tough situations.
•    High energy level, enthusiasm, and passion for the business.

Send resumes to Ali Sales, ali@compendiumblogware.com.
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What is this CMS thingy?
Posted Wednesday, October 29, 2008 by Jason Gergely
CMS stands for Content Management System. A Content Management System simply put is used to manage content in a collaborative manner. It is used to create, manage, edit, and publish content while making it easy to manage and organize. High schools use it so that each department is able to design its own specific web page under the umbrella of the school website. What it does it gives the specific departments a free range of adding information, while maintaining a similar look across the entire website. It makes it easier in the long run for designing websites. If the website has a small error or something that needs to be changed, you don't have to go back to the web designer because you can do it yourself.
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Are your Business Blogs Invisible?
Posted Tuesday, October 28, 2008 by Chris Baggott
Invisibility is a dream of many....BUT NOT A GOAL OF MARKETERS!  

A content management system or Blog Building Software is useless if it makes you invisible to the people searching for your business.

Basic Blog Software is usually pretty good at helping a business target one or even a few keywords.  The problem of course is that most business bloggers (or marketers) want to target hundreds or thousands of keywords, not one or two...or even 10. 

By definition, that means organizations need to have multi user blog software and blogging technologies that scale beyond what one can get out of software designed for citizen journalism and focused on the ROI associated with SEO and lowering the cost of customer acquisition. 

I know this sounds self serving but I started Compendium Blogware because there was no other solution of business blogging on the market that would help me accomplish my goals.  I don't want to be invisible.....and neither do you!
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Managing a blog for SEO
Posted Monday, October 27, 2008 by Jim Hyslop
I was fortunate enough last week to have a really good meeting with a potential client who has been exploring blogging for her company. Over the past 60 days she has been doing research on basic blog software trying to determine which solution may be the easiest to use and manage from a blogging perspective and from an SEO perspective.

She had done her homework but was very discouraged about all of the time and energy she was going to have to spend in an area where she really knew very little. Needless to say when she asked the question..."so, how can Compendium help me" she was very pleased with what she heard.

We were the breath of fresh air she had been looking for simply because we took all of the blog management responsibilities off her shoulders and carried that burden for her. Not only that but our interface made it simple for her to get in create content and get out.

A one stop shop solution for everything she needed right here in one easy solution. So don't fear the things you don't know about. Employ someone who does and allow your business succeed.
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