RSS driven Internet Site: Part Two

Too often people start designing (or redesigning) an internet site with the home page. I believe that this approach is a fatal error. Rather, I think one must start looking at the content which can be regularly updated and sent to the users via email and now RSS.

Hopefully this effort produces several initial feeds. This is just like publishing books, magazines or other materials in that you can never be sure which feeds will succeed. So plan to roll out several over a few months with the understanding that you might fold up a feed or two along the way.

The tools used to produce this content is the same tools used to produce blogs and takes advantage of all of the tools for promoting blogs. For example, one could use Manilla or TypePad to create the content. They allow editing, access control, posting the message, notifying blogger.com and other sites that the content is update, writing the RSS file and storing the archive. They also allow users to comment and possibly display links back to the content from other sites. These products can also send emails to an email list manager (e.g., Lyris) or can be used with Bletter for more customization.

So this most important content is stored in RSS with the web interface being handled by a blogging tool. This gives you web pages, archives, RSS feeds and enewsletter to reach your audience.