John Ryan’s Blog

If you listen to a local radio station, or use a community resource, such as GAA or even a Credit Union, you will most lightly find that they all have a website of some description. Most of these websites present you with a terrible design, featuring little content made using web 0.01 templates; others have an amazing design with bells and whistles and loads of those annoying flash animations, with little actual updated content.

I often wonder why these organisations, such as my own local radio station do not simply launch a blog instead. Being able to add posts when necessary as well as maintaining an archive of information, so that people have easy access to updated information is much more what the internet is about these days; the time of stagnant websites that sit untouched and unloved like a 40 year old virgin are long gone.

Blogs can be ‘DIY professional’ – if there is such a thing, with endless designs for the front end and many capabilities in the back end, the expansions are endless. Galleries, podcasts, pages of information, archives, tagging, search engine friendly, its all there waiting for these organisations to take advantage, so why don’t they?

It’s a question I don’t have an answer to – but what I do know is that some organisations have adopted blogs for their organisations, one of my personal favourite and possibly one of the biggest success for Limerick based organisations is the Limerick Animal Welfare Blog, which is not only regularly updated but also features many images and even the odd video. You can get a real insight into what a well run and worth while organisation this is.

I can’t find many such blogs, and maybe my head is in the sand – so make me feel foolish and comment if you know any good community blogs.