David and Company Blog

People are always wondering which kind of site is best suited to meet their needs and of course the answer to that question is “it depends.” For a more thorough discussion of that, see my article titled “CMS, When to Use”.

Here, I’ll give you the Top 3 Reasons to use a static site.

First – you have a small site, not a lot of pages, and you don’t anticipate the need to change it frequently. It might be a “portfolio” or “brochure” kind of site, where the purpose is to share some information that isn’t going to change often. Many of these kinds of sites emphasize style and appearance and don’t have an SEO (search engine optimization) focus.

Second – you don’t have a lot of time to make changes, so having a CMS (content management system) style of site would just be a waste of time. This is a very realistic understanding of what’s involved in having a CMS site, in other words, CMS sites should be updated regularly in order to take full advantage of their capabilities. They can be very useful for SEO, but if you don’t have the time to post, you simply won’t get the benefit being able to update your own site.

Third – realizing that SEO is still important to those who have static sites (and you don’t want to miss out on that, after all, why have a site if no one comes to visit), you have handled that need by using a blog site like Blogger and you drive traffic to your site by linking to it in your posts. Well done!

Another solution that I’ve offered to some in this situation is to have the static site, but incorporate a dynamic blog within the static site, using WordPress in most cases. This also works well.

There you have it. My 3 Top Reasons to Use a Static Website and of course, if you’d like help with that please feel free to contact me at David and Company.

Quite a few years ago I interviewed for a job in Tech Support with QuarkXPress, which I was later offered, during which I learned a very interesting thing. It seems the number one reason for a tech support call at that time was because “it won’t print”. Most of these calls were about being able to print to a desktop printer and so the problem was almost always related to some kind of system problem, like a missing or unselected printer driver. Determining what the problem may be would have been facilitated by having a checklist of necessary steps and possible errors. I say “would have been” because I didn’t take the job and so can’t speak with authority about how they actually approached this problem.

In the years since, I have worked as a graphic designer and have found that having a “must do” checklist related to printing has been a useful tool. One that I’d like to share with you here. (The following list is geared towards professional printing only, not a simple topic, but I’ll attempt to keep it brief.) (continue reading…)