In this post you’ll learn how Scribefire, a free blogging extension for the Firefox, Chrome, and Sarari browsers, can equip your organization’s website team with a cross-platform tool to lighten the burden of posting fresh content.
In The Blogging Church authors Brian Bailey and Terry Storch explain that the easiest way to maintain an interactive website–and that’s the kind you’ll want, because an interactive one will get more visitors–is to use a blog, or perhaps even several blogs, linked together. And why do they recommend that churches use blogs for their websites? Because:
- Blogs make posting content very easy.
- Controlling the appearance of your website, and maintaining uniformity of style throughout its pages has become very easy with blogging software.
- Blogs facilitate comments from visitors, thus raising reader interest.
- Through blogging plugins (easy-to-install, compact software packages) blogs link easily to large social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. Alerting such networks to your fresh posts is an efficient way to attract new readers.
- Blogs by their very nature (web logs) encourage posting of fresh content; and generally–though this is easily alterable–they show that content on the top page where it’s immediately visible without having to click or scroll very far.
- Blogs automatically organize and archive past posts to make it easy for readers to find what they’re looking for.
- Through blog indexes like Zamanta, they help your site link to other sites, thus raising its visibility in search engines.
- Blogging will put your organization in touch with other bloggers, and bloggers tend to be activists. They are better connected than the average Web surfer. The power of the internet is interconnectivity. If you want to take full advantage of that power, get connected to the people who are best connected: bloggers.
- Blogging applications are lean content management systems, allowing you to assign various levels of editing privileges to a team of persons so that you can spread the work of posting fresh content.
In the remainder of this post I will speak to that last bullet point: spreading the burden of posting fresh content to your website. Unless you have the funding to hire a webmaster, posting can get very tedious! Even with easy-to-use website editing tools it gets tedious! It’s a rare volunteer who will stick with the the technical and routine nature of this work. Wouldn’t it be better to find volunteers who like writing or taking photographs, and train them to post their own content, without their going through a webmaster? That’s where Scribefire comes in, a free, easy-to-use, cross-platform blog editor, the perfect tool for a web team working together to maintain a website. By this model the posting responsibility is not laid upon one person, but rather, is shared among several. Of course, team members could use various tools for posting. But for training purposes it’s best to use the same tool. Furthermore, if any member is having posting problems, the team can trouble shoot in an online desktop-sharing session. It will help if all the members are already familiar with the interface. And of course, they will be if they’re all using the same site editing tool, Scribefire, which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.
In my next CyberKenBlog post I’ll show you by video how to install and configure Scribefire, and how to set up your organization’s blogging site so that several volunteers with their own passwords have editing privileges, while the full administrative control of the site remains in the hands of the person with the Administrator password.
Related articles
- 20+ Essential Tools and Applications For Bloggers (hongkiat.com)
- Using Zemanta with any blogging platform (zemanta.com)
- Zemanta is a good social media tool (zemanta.com)
- Testing out ScribeFire extension for Chrome (fty720.blogspot.com)
