Poliblog Perspective

Under the Hood - Technical Notes for New Political Bloggers

The technical bits of creating a blog are the boring bits, but also cause the most problems in the future if you get them wrong.

These are my views, and some others will not agree.

Put your blog in the right place

Blogs suffer very badly when they move around the internet, because links and authority in search engines are based on specific web page addresses (called “permalinks” in blog-speak).

A blog that moves to a new location has to start from scratch again. It can be done, but it is an intricate process that takes up your valuable time - and is not necessary when you plan properly.

Choose a domain name carefully

Think carefully about your domain name - and try not to change it in the future. There is at least one Conservative Candidate for Westminster who has “AM” in his domain name - you can see the obvious problem if he wins the election.

My preference is to use a personal name or pseudonym to create a personal “brand”. One hazard of this approach is that a well-known name can bury you in the search engine results, which is bad luck for politicians called John Smith or Witney Houston.
I share “Matt Wardman” with a part time gay model called “Matthew Wardman”, which is a little close for comfort but manageable.

Use a UK domain name

Unless there is a very good reason, use a “dot uk” domain name. Google UK prioritises these over international (e.g., .com) domain names in its search results, and accounts for more than half of all UK internet searches. I cannot overemphasise this point.

A lot of important UK Political Blogs are stranded on “dot com” domain names like beached whales - so this is one way that new blogs can steal a march on the “oldies”. Many people are gradually changing over - but each takes a traffic and profile hit when they do so.

It is far better to start on a “dot uk” site.

Get your domain early

Even if you are not starting at once, get a domain now - if you can predict the name. Put up a basic blog and post occasional articles on it.

Submit it to internet directories, and ask a few blog-friends to link to you. This will help shorten the delay to gain visibility once you really start.

Own your own Blog

Own your publishing platform, your own separate domain name and make sure that you are not dependent on your current position or employer. That way they cannot close you down, and you do not risk embarrassing the organisation by something you say.

The only exception is if you are writing a blog that reflects your professional role, and will be closed down when you leave. However, in that case you should consider writing a personal blog in addition.

So, be an “owner occupier” blogger rather than living on somebody else’s system (e.g., Blogger), even if it is rent-free. You have less control and less flexibility as a tenant.

One alternative that may be available to you is to use a hosted service such as Blogger or Wordpress.com with your own domain name. I don’t recommend this, for the reasons described in this article.

There are also people specialising in political websites, who will manage your whole site for you.

What will it cost?

My sites are hosted on Dreamhost, and I use a package that costs around $100 per year. At present all my sites are hosted there, and I am using only a small fraction of the bandwidth and space available to me. This is a good place to start.

I would describe Dreamhost as a convenient and easy to use service, rather than one that is of industrial strength. If I were running a site pulling in more than say 15-20,000 users or delivering 40-50,000 page impressions per day I would host it somewhere else.

However, there is (I think) only one UK political blog drawing traffic in this category - and that is Political Betting.

For UK domains I use 123-reg.co.uk, and it costs £6 for 2 years.

So you should be able to get up and running on your own domain for around £60 or so.

Further Reading

There is a good list of the pros and cons of using a hosted platform vs maintaining your own domain on owning your own domain and installing blog software such as Wordpress on attackr.com.

Wrapping Up

I’ll be finishing off this series about starting a political blog tomorrow with a list of things that I think are needed on all politician’s blogs.

One example: Elected Politicians should make their position, affiliation, and constituency obvious in the first screen you see when you visit their blog; many do not.

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