Day: May 9, 2008

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Blog Writer Rights

My firm blogs for many clients professionally and we may be one of the only writing firms doing this, but we license our content to you for exclusive use on your blog, but do not write blog posts as “work for hire”.

We don’t specifically blog as “work for hire” to protect our writers and our content from unexpected use. We’ve had people write how-to books from a compilation of our blog posts, use blog posts verbatim as press releases, and we’ve even had some clients use our blog posts as new website content. None of them ever told us upfront what they were going to do, but used our services in a manner in which they were not contracted for nor expected for use. Blog posts are supplied at a much lower compensation rate than other writing and so use in this manner is simply cheating us out of a fee.

You only have to be burned once to know you need to cover an issue in your letter of agreement! Now we license our writing to clients for their exclusive use on their blog only. We can expand on a blog post and create web content or a press release at our special writer rates for these services, but a blog post has to stay as a blog post. That protects other aspects of our writing business, makes sure that our writing staff is fairly compensated for their work based on market pricing, and allows our business to grow.

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Navigation Where Do You Put It?

Typically navigation belongs on the left of your web page. Years and websites have trained readers to look for navigation there. If you differ from this model, you’d better have a good reason as you do not want to needlessly confuse readers or have your site be difficult to navigate. One of the top reasons for a new website design is to improve navigation.

What we typically will do is to provide major navigation links on the left and detail links at the top with drop downs. Another suggestion is if you have a large site is to provide top level navigation on the top and then section specific navigation on the left. The left navigation will be different for each section but the top navigation will be unchangeable.

We also strongly recommend for mid size sites that you include a site integrated web search function. Let customers find what THEY want fast. Improving your navigation will make your website more search engine friendly – typically, more readable, and more usable by your site visitors.

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Social Bookmarking – Should You Implement It?

Yes, even if you are not using social bookmarks yourself, you should implement their use on your web pages and blogs. There is a whole sector out there that can help you to promote your site if you allow for the easy tools to allow users to share your information with others.

There are several sites that allow for auto generation of the code that allows for automatic sharing versus many popular sites. If you click our post title you will go to one site that even allows for a variety of configurations.

Some social bookmarking sites give you code to install, others have easy to add Blogger or WordPress widgets, just do a web search and you will find many sites that will help to educate you on the installation and even allow you to select the services that you want to include.

Some of the hot social bookmarking sites on the Web that you will want to include for sure are Digg, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon just to name a few. If you have one you like to use not in my short list, just leave it as a comment below.