Blogs & CMS setup and integration

[Chris_CDC]

Hi Guys,

I'm quite new to all things website wise. I understand the 'basics' of SEO (i think) and i'm alright with html but my experience stops there.

Since i signed up to SEOMOZ, i've realised the importance of SEO and therefore our company has now employed 'an expert' to help us to go forward who happens to work for our web hosting company.

Throughout the discussions, they strongly emphasised the importance of blogging and having a proper blog setup on our site and so we went along with the suggestion along with the SEO.

Before we began, i went away and redesigned our site updating a lot of the content, the layout etc to basically give them a much better starting point because ultimately it would only benefit us.

They have just started the work this month and to say i'm underwhelmed is an understatement!!

With regards to the blog, as i didn't know what they were planning to do, i created three links at the bottom of our pages which looked like blog posts, a general blog page, and some blog posts which are all simple html pages.

I assumed that they would then go away and create the blog thereselves and then obviously add it to our site. They have just come back now and said to me that as our site doesn't have a CMS, they will have to forward me the weekly posts and i will have to add them to the site myself and post them to our facebook and twitter pages.

I am not particularly impressed with this as this is what we have paid just over £800 for which supposedly included them setting it up and managing it and did not include the SEO which is a lot of money for a small company as ourselves.

What i wanted to know is that from our site as it stands now: http://www.customdesignedcable.co.uk, would it be difficult to include some sort of blog system that would integrate into our pages on the footer and the blog page or would i have to redesign the site through something such as joomla? I have never used joomla and i've only just found out that it exists.

I'm asking on this forum as all of you guys know what your talking about and before i go back to them all guns blazing tomorrow, it would be great to be 'well up' on how difficult it would be and what the easiest ways would be to do it just to give me some ammo because i think they are talking out of there backsides!

Any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated!!

Big Thanks Guys!!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Chris.

[William.Lau]

So you paid 800GDP for articles? How many articles did they right 10,000?

What I suggest is install WordPress, simple and easy CMS platform that you can customize. Use it in the subfolder. And then insert all the posts.

EDIT:

PS. Never hire another company unless they are highly reputable or focused in article writing. A lot of the time those articles are spinned, or they hired overseas to be spinned or just half-ass written. I suggest hiring an actual blogger that has good experience generating engaging content. And pay them per post.

If you are engaged with your business and follow trends/blogs, some bloggers and journalist do freelance writing, this can be beneficial as well since some of them have a following already. That can create more exposure.

[ThompsonPaul]

Are you still looking for feedback on this question, Christopher? Just checking as you mention you had a meeting set with your SEO folks the day after this question went up. How did it go?

Paul