Steve Eilertsen (Director of IT) at Platinum Planet contacted Improvate IT about enabling an easy and cost effective way for their agents to own a website. The need emerged after it became clear that many agents cannot afford a web designer to develop their own website. Improvate IT found this challenge quite exciting.

The solution lay in enabling people to start their own web blog. A web blog (or blog for short) is essentially an online journal that is enabled through a specialized blog system. Blog is short for web log. Journal entries can consist of articles, opinions, photos or movies.

So what are the advantages of blogging? Blogging allows you to share comments easily and enables your website visitors to comment to your posts. It allows you to position yourself as an expert. It helps you build your brand. Blogging is great for search engine marketing, especially if you are new to the web and do not have design and development resources available. The best thing about blogging is the fact that it costs very little!

There are many blogging systems out there! After a long search, Improvate IT finally found a blogging platform that enables blogging whilst not compromising our existing hosting platforms. WordPress is the obvious choice.

WordPress is powerful open-source and free blogging software. It has been written in PHP and is backed by a MySQL database. Improvate IT understands that not many people know how to configure PHP and MySQL systems. This is why we offer a fully configured WordPress system to anyone who requires it.

Improvate IT now enables you by empowering you to get your WordPress blog up and running in one hour!

Why WordPress? There are many good reasons...

• WordPress supports over 50 languages thus making blogging accessible to everyone! Even if you speak Greek. ;-)
• You can import your content from other blogs like Blogger, LiveJournal, Type Pad and WordPress blogs hosted elsewhere.
• Excellent spam prevention. WordPress partnered with Akismet and there stops spammers from entering spam into your blogs.
• Excellent help archives should you need help using WordPress.

WordPress is also widely used. In fact in 2007 there have been 3,816,965 WordPress downloads! It is used by Yahoo, CNN, Sony PlayStation and even Ford (which is a Fortune 5 website).

Clearly blogging provides a solution that could see anyone owning a website in a relatively short space of time and is quite inexpensive! If Improvate IT could do it for South Africa's largest investment property company, Platinum Planet, we can definitely do it for you.

Published: 2008-08-12