I am speaking on blogging on Saturday Dec 13, 2008 at the Writers’ Circle of Durham Region (wcdr.org).

I have also scheduled a workshop for Feb 21,2009 to teach website writing with WordPress. (Link)

These are my notes for that talk. The purpose of the talk is not to cover the mechanics of blogging but more of the art and philosophy of blogging and website construction in general. Personally I am a huge WordPress fan. I have created many sites both blogs and general websites with WordPress. I like to include tips on ways I have found mold WordPress to what my client wants to do.

Points to cover:

• What is the purpose of your website. What do you want the visitor to do? (Link)
• How will they find the site: searching, links from other sites or advertising? (Link)
• Where is your target audience: local, same country, global. (Link)
• Why do visitors come to your site (what do they expect to get)?
• How will you tracking visitor movement? Expectations?
• How do they find their item of interest? Search, click on a list, on that screen?
• What tools will you use to build the site? Do the tools limit who can visit your site? (Link)
• What media will be on the site?
• Is the focus of your site visual vs words – effect on reaction and finding
• Use of flash vs HTML
• PC vs Mac (Link)
• Windows vs OS X vs Linux
• IE/FF/Opera/Safari/Chrome/iPhone, Blackberry (Link)
• Hosting – cost vs reliability and capacity
• How are site backups done? Database and uploaded files
• Open source vs commercial tools
• Image sizes
• Will visitors have a high vs low speed connection

“what is a blog”, “Why do I need a blog”, and “How can a blog help my writing?”
Why people would want to go to their blog / website.

If you have any other questions please feel free to post and I will add them to the list.