Why a Blog?

We’ve chosen to set up the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing Web site at the University of California, Riverside, using Wordpress blogging software.  Why?  From 1994 to 2006, we’ve maintained a series of websites for our research centers - Project 2000, eLab, and the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing - at Vanderbilt University.  Tools for implementing these websites ranged from hand-coded html on a Unix server back in 1994, to Frontpage, to Dreamweaver and ColdFusion. 

After moving to the University of California, Riverside, in July 2006, we decided it was time for a change.  We wanted more flexibility and speed of development than our previous Dreamweaver/ColdFusion-based website could provide.  Back in 1994, we enjoyed the real-time hand-on satisfaction of seeing our content appear on the Web as we coded our html pages directly on our unix server.  Doesn’t sound too exciting, but at the time it was very new!  Over time, our technical staff took on the role of maintaining our Web site via Dreamweaver and ColdFusion, and we found ourselves several steps removed from the process, which had become fairly complex.  At UCR, we wanted to regain control of our content, but weren’t thrilled about the prospect of becoming Web designers.    

We rapidly converged on Wordpress as the solution.  With Wordpress, the look and feel of our website can be changed overnight.  We like our current variant of the popular Connections Wordpress theme, but it is very easy to completely alter the look and feel of our website should we choose to do so.  The right hand sidebar of our website uses widget technology, making it simple to customize the items in the sidebar in a matter of seconds.  Behind the scenes, a variety of plugins are hard at work, providing navigation, tagging and tag clouds, sitemaps, enhanced search, content formatting, and much more - it’s amazingly easy to provide advanced capabilities to your Web site via Wordpress plugins.

We are currently using Wordpress more as a comprehensive content management system than as a pure blog.  Wordpress allows two basic types of content - posts and static pages.  Wordpress allows us to group our posts into a set of categories, and much content can be entered as posts.  All of our research papers, for example, appear as posts in the “research” category, which can be viewed separately from the full list of posts on our main page.  Over time, we will incorporate more and more content through posts, all of which will be searchable.  Right now we have disabled comments for most of our posts - but most posts in the “observations” category will allow comments.  In addition to posts, Wordpress also allows static pages to be created, organized, and maintained.  Our static pages include pages for our panel, the eLab eXchange project, and Sloan Center faculty. 

So - Wordpress has given us control over our content, and we’re happy!