Most people know we are not great fans of WordPress because of its poor security and SEO characteristics. Essentially for the small problem it solved it creates many more. So for us the purposes it suits are few. However one of the areas WordPress has always shined was as a easily deployable blogging platform.
Will WordPress remain the King of blogs
Enter Ghost Blog platform, which is even easier to setup. Literally 15-20 minutes to install and do a basic configuration. We even have set it up in our auto install software system, so it can be done in around 5 minutes.
Editing the Ghost blogger theme is much the same as any html theme, though it does have one little trick. Ghost Blog has two modes development and Production. In production mode Ghost Blog caches all your pages and themes. Consequently it won’t display the updated pages without being refreshed. However, you can change .css and add code to the footer and header through the admin panel. Which is great for adding analytics.
You can also install themes
Themeforest has a wide range of themes to choose from if you don’t want to do a custom theme. These can be further customised.
Some of the best features
Ghost Blog is lite! Boy is it lite, software users often complain that a once great platform is now bloated and slow, for example WordPress, Firefox and Chrome. Its almost unavoidable, however there are a few years of glory and that is the time for Ghost Blog. Ghost blog is not jam packed with useless features and plugins, just the fundamentals. Ghost blog is lite and fast.
Internal server caching. Ghost Blog has its own internal caching. Which makes your pages load faster. Faster pages result in better SEO and user experiences.
Writable URLs. One very strong SEO feature to have in your site is writable or controlable SEO friendly urls. This has always been a pain with WordPress and one of the reasons store owners leave WordPress for Magento.
Mobile Friendly. If your not mobile friendly forget it. I can’t believe people still install non-mobile friendly themes into WordPress and then complain it doesn’t search well.
Highly accessible to Google search. Google just seems to love this platform. From the search friendly urls, titles, in page coding, meta tags, tags Google is all over this platform. This is the whole point of a blog in my eyes. You want to get seen by Google.
Social media sharing buttons as standard fair. I’ll admit there could be more, but it has the basics Facebook, Twitter and Googeplus.
Multiple user and access controls. This is one of my favourite features. I already love it because you can run it along site your store platform and not in it. Which adds another layer of security, because you don’t tend to know the backgrounds on a lot of your authors sometimes. So you can add authors, editors and administrators which makes for a great amount of control and security.
Run under https or http. Most importantly you can run Ghost blog under either full encryption or without. Its childs play to do this and it won’t bug out or break encryption endlessly as WordPress does. Another reason why its so good to run along side your online store.
CMS is nice and simple. This is the big thing anyone can use this if they can run MS Notepad. You can get tricky with it if you want. However you can produce a nice blog with incredibly limited skill set.
You can save blogs as drafts or publish. This is very handy if you want to perform quality control on your blog posts.
Summary
If you’re looking to increase your content and potentially your search engine rankings through blogging Ghost blogger is a real world solution. Its cheap to deploy and has all the features needed to run a nice blog. See us at Mebsites if you want to know more.
