I’ve given my blog something of a makeover today, which made me wonder if that’s exactly what the PR industry needs. Online media and digital PR campaigns are now a key part of public relations, but I’m not sure if the current skillset of PRO’s reflects that.
From editing client websites to writing blog posts and formatting html newsletters, web design is now a part of PR. Rather than having a digital team to deal with the online stuff, all PRO’s should have a good understanding of web design. PRO’s clearly don’t need to be equipped with the same level of skills as web designers but I think a basic knowledge of web design languages like CSS and HTML would certainly be a good idea.
Another thing I noticed when I updated this site was how quickly it had got out of date. Richard Millington reckons bloggers should update blogrolls weekly and site designs monthly. I agree, udating your blogroll and having a tinker with your site’s design is a great way to keep your blog looking fresh. It’s only been two or three months since I last updated my blog, but in that time Jed Hallam started working at Wolfstar PR, Stephen Davies started 3WPR, and I contributed to an eBook about Digital PR. All of which made parts of my blog and website out of date.
Looks good. I wouldn’t have guessed it was a blogger account.
I should really follow my own advice about updating my design. It looks terrible.
I did find a cool bloglines hack that immediately updates my blogroll every time I add someone’s RSS feed into my reader.
What’s black and white and read all over?
OK Watson, now I have to update my blog design! Thanks for that! Cheers for the mention by the way, expect it to be reciprocated in my next post.
Hope you’re well mate.
Good call on updating the blog roll, this is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
Not so sure about changing the layout often however. As a sometime designer I can’t quite believe I’ve just been happy with my standard WordPresss layout, but when you look at the format adopted by for example Scoble and Rubel, or indeed Jakob Nielsen, they’re all fairly plain and haven’t changed much for a while. Which leads me to believe that it doesn’t matter too much what your *social media* presence looks like. Websites might be different, but blogs can be basic. In fact you could argue that it’s better not to change, because people know what to expect.
Having said which I am now looking into self-hosting my blog, mainly because I want to use Feedsmith to make sure I’m getting an accurate idea of all my subscribership, but also because I just want to play around with the cool widgets I can’t use on a wordpress.com blog.
Matt, I think you have done a good job with the redesign and I agree that we should all know/understand some element of web design.
I totally agree about the blogroll update need, I really need to get onto mine as I’m reading so many more these days. But I’m not sure about the need to redesign. I’m not just trying to make myself feel better for hardly doing mine, but shouldn’t it be the content that stays fresh and engaging?
So many of your subscribers (like me) must just be used to a default setting anyway after using a feed service, they may not even know about your redesign. And do web design trends change that often?
I feel like it’s very easy to always be working towards a ‘big redesign/launch’ but a lot harder to maintain in the meantime; to keep inputting regular stories into the same template. When you’re doing that it means that you have to be passionate about your content, not just your design.
I agree with your comments on web design and PR. At the end of the day, it is as much a time/money saver as anything else!
A delayed thanks for the linkage Matthew!
thank u r information