Adam asked me to think about helping a friend of his blogify their extant small business website. He suggested considering TypePad or WordPress; I probably would lean to suggesting TypePad to minimize administrative overhead. However, I hadn’t looked at WordPress closely yet and so this afternoon I went and grabbed it. As advertised, the setup was nice and smooth. I also downloaded Mambo to take a look at; while blog-oriented CMS apps can sure be tweaked and hacked to provide small-scale site publication and maintenance features in a number of ways, sometimes a less bloggy CMS provides greater site-publication flexibility.

This reminds me that I have a partially-deployed Folklore codebase on the server that I have yet to finish setting up (there were some heinous pathing errors that I lacked the will to battle).

I’m also reminded that I should actually write down my many persuasive ideas about why it’s probably important for small business people to blog their business life. Last night I was discussing this with a friend who creates wedding invitation packages. She was telling me that she “couldn’t bear” to pimp out her stuff on other people’s blogs. She’s right, of course; that’s comment spam, or very close to it. I started to explain why it would be a better strategy for her to blog the business activity itself, to write about buying the paper, about helping her customers make their product selections and so forth. But I was unable to coherently lay this out, since I have really only mused on it privately.

She had a basic misunderstanding of the methodology and business reasons that a small-business owner might find blogs a useful customer-communication and retention tool. I think this is because if you’re not a blog reader (which is most people), the idea and purpose of blogging remains unclear.

Additionally, the primary concern of mom-and-pop shops on the web is visibility. Therefore the initial conclusion many mom-and-pops reach is that they must engage in search-engine optimization strategies, whether simply building their sites to conform to spidering’s needs or going so far as to buy a linkfarm. This has a lot of pitfalls, of course.

So, uh, note to self: write about this.