A 3rd party blog that can be inserted to website via HTML?

[Gavin James]

Hello, I'd really appreciate some advice. I'm not sure where to start.

I use a subscription-based online, template driven, drag and drop website builder. Everything is hosted on its own servers and is linked to my own domain.

However, it's own blog feature is limited (e.g. no option to browse keywords, or even categories, it just creates thumbnails that link to blog pages).

The provider has advised that there is nothing stopping me adding a 3rd party blog to my site and that this would be a case of inserting it via HTML (the webpage builder has a "+" feature to add HTML sections to pages).

Can anybody recommend some blog software or a provider?

Key criteria I guess are: easy to use; no need to learn Wordpress etc.; & if it helps me to email/upload blogs to Linkedin all the better.

(Lastly, I don't know whether the above will benefit or disbenefit my SEO?)

Thank you if you can help?

Gavin

 

[karmacomputing]

Hi Gavin,

Do you use WebPlus by Serif?

(Without knowing your website)

The least risky and least disruptive solution might be for you to install your blog on a subdomain of your current website. For example if your website is "example.com" you would create a subdomain "bog.example.com".

This allows clean separation between your web builder tool (please may you clarify which one it is?) and the website.

Regards,
Chris

 

[g]

Without knowing the 'insert third-party blog/hosting/other' specifics of your provider... my best advice is that you'd be smart to get an appropriate hosting service and learn enough about WordPress to be able to use it sensibly.

Depending on how the switch is made your SEO needn't be affected.

 

[BenKirkwood]

If your only option is HTML then this implies that you'd need to embed your blog solution as iFrame and serve from 3rd party/your own server or, perhaps pull-in and render a feed using JavaScript - either way, its a can of worms and it will do nothing for your SEO.

 

[Gavin James]

Hello.

Chris: I use xweb.io

The maker of this was heavily involved with Serif Webplus templates, but now runs this service which, unlike Webplus, includes responsive templates. So I guess it has some similarities...

Website is makowskiassociates.co.uk

 

[fisicx]

A blog accesses a database to build the content, manage comments, tags, search, linkedin feeds and so on. You can't just bolt it into an HTML page as it (usually) required php, asp or some other scripting language and a database.

You can as suggested use an iframe but this will chuck your responsive theme into a cocked hat.

To be honest, it's going to far quicker and simpler to move your existing site to a blogging platform than it will be to add a blog to your xweb site.

Looking at the xweb site, the code is just as nasty as serif was. This will affect your SEO.

 

[Russ Michaels]

I had a look at your website, and it is very simple pages and would be a simple job to just redo the entire website in WordPress, which would give you much more flexibility going forward. I assume that if you cannot even add a blog to the current site, you cannot do much else either.

If you do desperately want to keep the current serif site, then take a look at cloudflare.com, using the free plan they have various plugins that you can insert content into an existing site, which may do what you want. Or you could just setup a free blog at wordpress.com or blogger.com or other such service and link to it from your main site.