From Web Review (http://www.webreview.com/2002/02_04/designers/ index01.shtml), now defunct. Article re-printed below.
By James Ellis
For web sites to look current and vital, they need a steady diet of fresh content. You—the designer/builder—certainly don't want to spend all day adding articles to the news page or updating the client's "You can see me at" travel page, do you? On the other hand, do you really want someone else to do it? A majority of our clients, be they freelance or in-house, are not well-versed in HTML or even WYSIWYG software. And even if they were, you're responsible for the site. Are you sure you want other people stomping through your meticulously coded site with a clod-footed WYSIWYG?
What you do need is some basic content management—a way to separate the new content from your wonderful design. You need to let subject experts add content when they want, not when you have time. But content management software can be expensive, cumbersome, and a hassle for most sites. Is there a better way? Yes. You can take the power of weblogs and add them to your professional site.
Weblogs, or blogs, are a popular way of posting content to the web via a simple interface. Think of them as web-based diaries you can update from almost anywhere. Imagine adding content to your web site without writing any HTML, firing up Dreamweaver, or FTPing a single thing. Just go to a web site, log in, type your content, and publish. Within seconds, it's inserted into a template and on your site. (See Biz Stone's story on weblogs for more information.)
So many weblogs look like personal diaries, not meeting our high design standards for professional sites. But there are ways that you can use the simple, HTML-less interface of weblogging to add fresh content to your conservative, business-oriented web site.
There are two basic types of weblogging tools: Those that run on your server, and those that run on someone else's. Blogger is the most popular software right now. The software runs on their server and publishes to yours. It's free, you can run multiple blogs, you don't have to download any software, and it runs on a browser interface. Edit the account to publish via FTP to your web site, and you're ready to go.
If you want a bit more control, you might want to get software that runs on your server. Movable Type is getting a lot of buzz right now. Developed completely in Perl, MT is installed on your server, and also run via a browser window. When you set it up, the default template is pretty bare. Let's keep it that way for now.
Other weblogging tools you might consider are Grey Matter, Manila, and b2. They all work fundamentally the same, so take your pick (see David Hauslaib's story on other blog software).
Templates. Blog software takes your content and adds it to a template. They can be incredibly complex, but since we're adding it to another page, we want a simple template. Strip out all unnecessary code until all you are left with is text (pick you own text properties) and a simple background. Make sure it all complies with your web site's style.
How Many Posts. Stories or articles to your blog are called "posts." You can decide beforehand how many posts will be available on your weblog, either by number (show only the last ten posts) or by date (show only the last week's worth of posts).
Who Posts. Can only the president post? Or an entire department? Each blogging tool does it differently, but you can determine who can make posts and who can't.
Do You Archive. Do you let people see all the old posts (in a separate file) or not? News stories or press releases about your organization might be a great thing to archive.
Your blogging software will create an HTML file. You need to insert it into your page on the web site for it to look seamless. How do we do that?
A couple of ways present themselves. The obvious is frames. But basic frames are cumbersome, have searching issues, and are rarely done well. There are better options.
An iframe (inline frame) creates a little window on your page. You can determine how wide and tall it is and where it is located on the page. Then, just like a normal frame, you list the target as your weblog. The iframe will build both vertical and horizontal scroll bars if your content is bigger than the frame, which is why I suggest that you ditch the formatting of your template and stick to links and text.
With iframes, there's no need to list the new target for links: Clicked links will fill the browser page, not just the window. Let's look at the source code:
<iframe id=id name="name" src="weblog.html" width="200" height="300" scrolling="Default" frameborder="0" marginwidth="10" marginheight="120" ></iframe>
The above code will create a 200 by 300 window for our blog (the code is very similar to normal frames, so we won't go over this step by step). This window will behave like any other object (image) that you would use in a simple HTML page—you can sit it between two paragraphs, put it in a table cell, add a headline above it, or a caption below it.
However, you can use a CSS div layer to float it into pixel-perfect position:
<div id="blogframe">
<iframe id=id name="name" src="weblog.html" width="200"
height="300" scrolling="Default" frameborder="0"
marginwidth="10" marginheight="120" >
</iframe></div>
<style type="text/css">
#blogframe{
position:absolute;
left: 15px;
top: 150px;
width: 200px;
height: 300px;
z-index: 50;
}
</style>
This will create a layer that floats above whatever else is on the page in the top left-hand corner relative to the page. With a little Javascript, you could create a mouseOver button that will make the layer appear on command, making more room for your other content. Because it lives in a div layer, it will behave like all other CSS div layers.
For more info, read the W3C spec or Chuck Musciano's Inline Frames article.
Server-Side Includes (SSI) have become a common tool. You add a simple line to your HTML code of the parent page to add a child page into the body of the parent.
<!--#include file="blog.html" -->
There are a few things to consider when using SSI. First, your server must be configured to parse (put together) the pages. Second, you'll probably have to name your parent page with an .shtml extension (determined by the server).
Remember back in chemistry class when you learned that a gas will take up all available space? Good, because that's how an SSI behaves. When adding an SSI, insert the child page into a table cell or div of the parent with a specific width. Otherwise, the child will take over the page:
<table width=200><tr><td> <!--#include file="blog.html" --> </td></tr></table>
Although the SSI solution is a seamless one, it may slow your server down. How much, I don't know (there isn't much hard data on whether it is a sizable impact), so you'll have to do some testing to see if the SSI affects download times seriously for you. (See Scott Saari's related WebReview story.)
Then, of course, you could stay simple and use an existing page as the template to post the weblog as it's own page.
Like all techniques, knowing when to use it is the real skill.
For example, if your site needs to publish the status of something on an on-going basis (e-mail server, database server, office closures, etc.), this would be a good technique. You should set the blog to show only the most current post unless you want everyone to see what your last couple of status changes were.
If you want to distribute the latest news, anyone with permission can add. Old news gets automatically dumped to the archives, which you can decide to publish or not. You can build your own news clipping service, or surf the Web for news articles you want to save and add them to a separate blog. The best part is, since the clippings are now on their own web page, you can let anyone add the news to their site. Imagine: You could be "the news" for your industry. You could even publish in RSS format, allowing anyone to publish your syndicated content (see Edd Dumbill's WebReview story on RSS).
Your traveling CEO can post notes from their speaking tour. Sales teams can announce what cities they will be in and when for customers.
You should limit your permissions. Having someone outside your organization posting to the site will prove confusing: Who is the "official voice of the enterprise?" If you are looking to build a web community where the audience would be creating the content like MetaFilter or Slashdot, a blog is probably not the right solution. Slashdot distributes the same software it uses to publish its site.
Allowing anyone in your organization to post to a weblog kept within the intranet gives you new options. You can cheaply build a knowledge management site, an internal communication site, or even a way for departments like Human Resources or Office Management to post new rules or policies without killing a forest.
People in your organization want to be part of the Web. They want to add content. They want to feel like they've done their part. Using weblogs to open that avenue without letting them run free through your HTML is a great way to do just that.