Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman

11.1. Understanding the Basics

Blogs began as a tool for anyone with a computer and a connection to the Internet to create and share their own personal diaries, journals, and commentary, but they soon morphed into sources for freelance news stories and editorial content. People with inside information or strong opinions could publish whatever they were thinking without having to be employed by a newspaper, magazine, radio station, or TV network. Blogging turned the power of the news media over to the people. This is still one of the most popular uses for blogs today.

As with most things on the Internet, businesses eventually started to tap blogging for commercial use. The popularity of blogs combined with their ease of use made them a perfect marketing tool for corporations, and the popularity of corporate blogging started to soar. Now, many businesses that have any sort of Internet presence have corporate blogs in addition to their more static web sites. Even Martha Stewart Living has a blog: blogs1.marthastewart.com!

11.1.1. Add a Style with Design (Presentation) Templates

One of the great things about blogs is that you can easily post content to the Web without having to learn or deal with complicated HTML (hypertext markup language), the codes that control the look and layout of Web pages. Blogging allows you to publish content by typing into a form and then clicking the "publish" button.

The HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets) codes are stored in design templates (often ...