Why Blogger?

Did you realize that what appears to be the briggsconsulting.ca website is actually a blog, hosted at Google's blogger?

I chose to experiment with Blogger for the site hosting after reading this post.  The author gives examples of some quite impressive (and very not-blog-like) websites.  My goal for this website was to provide a "virtual business card" rather than to generate traffic.  As such, I don't require a highly customized product, but simply wanted to convey some basic information in a relatively clean and easily user editable form.

While I am not a programmer, I can google search and cut&paste.  Blogger's static page function allowed me to create the majority of the tabs.  A bit of under the hood tweaking of the underlying HTML code customized the layout and removed most of the evidence that this website uses blog architecture.

Continuing to allow a blogging function (such as this post) within the site, while not taking over the main page, proved to be a bit of a challenge as blogger is designed to show new blog posts on the main or home page. I wanted to be able to make posts, but didn't want them to take over the home page, which displays a basic overview of my services.

The work-around ended up being quite simple: the home page is actually a blog post, but one that is dated a decade in the future.  Because it is future-dated, blogger defaults to always placing it at the front of the queue of blog posts. The settings have been altered to show only a single post on the main page and thus the "Services" blog post appears to be a static web page.

The "Blog" tab is actually a link to a search function within blogger that looks for posts labeled "news." So any dynamic content I want to show up as though it was a blog, I simply have to post to the blog and label as "news." The main page contains all of the blog posts, but hides all except the one (future-dated and therefore most-recent) I wish to keep as the main page. Everything else is accessible via the linked search for "news" labeled posts.

I'll see how workable this is in the longer term, but for now Blogger offers a user- friendly updating interface, the robustness of Google's architecture behind it, and access to the underlying HTML code to allow customization to a website-like appearance.  And all of this is provided for free.  A reasonable solution, in my opinion, if you are willing to do a bit of work to get the interface to work for you.