Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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WordPress, Typepad, or Blogger

As professional ghost bloggers, my team has used all the blogging platforms. Out of all, WordPress, Typepad, and Blogger, my team and I like Blogger best.

Why is that you ask? Blogger is simple, easy to use, not overly complicated, and is fairy trouble and bug-free. I employ a variety of people as ghost bloggers, not all are computer geeks. Some are great writers but what I may call not technologically super-savvy either. WordPress and Typepad have categories, meta tags, and much more, but do not make it easy and fast for our bloggers to use. In fact in one case, the blogger had to install Firefox on their computer just to be able to add tags in the WordPress interface. Tags won’t be saved when input with IE – not sure why there is this bug, but for a nearly technologically challenged excellent writer, this was and continues to be a big issue.

Typepad, we find not as simple nor as powerful as blogger. It is not easy to add a picture or to use the interface as the write and click Blogger interface. Where we have situations where clients sometime blog as well with us, simple and easy is extremely important. Blogger is just that. You have a post screen type your stuff, add a label at the bottom, spell check and you’re done.

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Hotmail Easier Than Yahoo Mail Beta

My Mom is just now trying to understand email and I really needed to find the simplest yet most powerful email client available to assist her. Our parents generation is technologically challenged. Some people my parents age have jumped on email as a way to connect with kids and grandchildren and others have really hit a brick wall and refused to embrace the technology that keeps them connected to others.

So, based on that what is unequivocally the easiest email application for the technologically challenged. Hotmail has the others beat hands down. For my Mom to try to even explain how to use Outlook Express and set up a mail download is way complicated. So I decided to set up an online mail service that she could check from any where, but it had to be simple.

My sister said, get Yahoo beta mail, it’s great, but oh boy for the technologically challenged, the interface is way complicated. Enter Hotmail. Super simple, clean, no clutter, intuitive controls, super easy configuration, one click actions and voila, my Mom is using email.

So if you have a parent, friend, grandparent, aunt, or uncle who needs to embrace the information age, try Hotmail first. What seems so incredibly simple to those of us who use the computer every day is like rocket science to others.

One sidebar on this, I found that I needed to even take time to instruct my Mom on how to use the mouse. As you help your relative, you may want to make sure that you cover this simple yet very important step, they may not even know to ask.

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Do You Own Your Blog Content

If you are employing a ghost blogger for your blog, you should ask “do I own my content?” You may or you may not. This may be a hot topic for some clients and for some ghost bloggers, but it is important to know what ownership rights you really have.

Currently we do not retain rights on our blogging content when we do it for others, we consider it a work for hire, but that may change.

What are your doing with your ghost blogging content do you license it, sell it outright, or retain ownership?

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Best Practices on Content

It should be said that there really is a best practice to quoting content on the Web. If you did not know it already, all content on the Web is covered by copyright laws.

One can not simply copy an article in entirety and then paste it into a blog or web page even with credit to the original author. One can copy one or two paragraphs, quote it, and then link to the full article on the original author’s website, but to copy and paste the full article into your own web page on your own website is a big no-no.

Unique content on your website and blog are important. There is simply no way around copyright laws or taking the time to create good content.

We routinely check to make sure that our content is protected and properly documented and linked back to our site on the Web. If you were not aware, there are even free online services that will scan the Web for content that matches your own pages. Don’t get yourself in trouble needlessly, make sure that you are following the best practice when it comes to content.