Honestly, I don’t know why more organizations don’t simply incorporate a blogging tool into their site and use it to post news and other announcements. Blogging tools are incredibly flexible, and you can use them just as a back-end content management system. Then you can take the feed from the blog and use it to publish content in your templates to your site — so it doesn’t even have to look like a “blog” or be on a separate site.

Then you’d get a feed (because every blogging tool has a built-in feed) plus other handy features like categorization and more.

Plus it would be a whole lot easier to publish your news in a timely way — and get the word to spread faster and wider — than the way most organizations currently post to the web.

But if can’t do that or find some other way to offer a feed, please please please offer an opt-in e-mail alert form on your site — and make sure every message that goes out on that list includes a one-click link to unsubscribe.

Thanks,

- Amy Gahran