With all these examples and ideas thrown out the table, hopefully you have now thought of at least a few ways in which blogs might play a role in your communications program. Let’s turn now to some more nitty-gritty.

First, how do you make a blog? Let me count the ways …

Hosted blogs. This is the easiest way to do it. Blogs have taken off so rapidly that there are a lot of services out there which offer inexpensive (or free) ways to start blogging. These are online services that enable you to sign up online, use a template, and start posting right away in your browser. A couple examples:

• Blogger.com
  The blog you’re reading now was created with the free Blogger tool, which is owned by Google. Go to blogger.com, fill out a couple of fields, pick a template, and start posting.

  No doubt, Blogger is waaay easy. But it has its limitations. First, it doesn’t allow you to group posts by category for easier archiving. Second, it offers no statistics on visits or pageviews, so you have to use a third-party service or else fly blind. Third, commenting is clumsy. Fourth, you have to deal with that annoying Blogger bar at the top of the page. Fifth, modifying the template (to, for example, add links to the sidebar like those on the right side of this page) involves hard HTML coding. And if you want to modify an entire template to match the look of your website, you’ll need someone with good programming skills.

  All that said, if you need a quick and free blog (like I did), it works great.

• TypePad
  TypePad is a paid-hosted service, with costs ranging from a few bucks a month to $14.95 or so, depending on the features you want. TypePad resolves a lot of the limitations mentioned above, allowing for simpler commenting, a relatively simple way to add items to the sidebar, a drag-and-drop templating interface, statistics (limited), and a design interface to change certain items about the template.

  At ACCA, we use the TypePad service for our blog. However, remember, if you want to completely customize a template — so that it fully integrates with your site’s look-and-feel — the template programming required is extensive.

Host your own blogs. If you want complete control over your blog(s), with total customization in application and design (so that it fully integrates with your primary site), then look into hosting your own blog program. (If you don’t care if the blog looks like the rest of your site, but you want a completely free blog and have the resources/expertise to set up blog software on your own web server, this is also an avenue to consider.)

There are tons of free or very inexpensive blogging platforms out there. Some of the best known ones are:

• Movable Type (the individual version of TypePad)
• WordPress
• Nucleus
• Greymatter

Some larger organizations with more specialized needs have also had blogging platforms built into their content management systems. In any event, there’s a blogging solution available for organizations of all sizes, staff levels, and expertise. And they all pretty much do the same thing. The only differences lie in the features and/or customizations you might want.

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