Promotion and discussion

Could be that we have different types of articles, like you were saying about newpapers. Authoritative ones, Best Guesses, and FAQ-type responses to reader questions. Blog posts can be used like newsletters, landing in people's email boxes. But that puts you on a posting schedule that may not mesh with the writing schedule for sustantive articles. I don't like having newsletters and blogs separately, because it's just duplicating effort and it's good to have newsletter content online somewhere anyway. As for user participation, allowing comments on articles (blog posts) definitely ups the interactive/community feeling and taps us into what people are thinking.

So, maybe it looks like this:
All communications get funneled though the blog, but are separated into different categories: authoritative articles that get indexed on the Composting 101/201 pages; informal essays that get indexed on a separate page (like "Dispatches From the Frontlines" or "Ground Level Updates" or something); and FAQ responses that get indexed on an FAQ page. New posts of any kind are delivered to email boxes as newsletters.

Then there is always a link to the store item/s, so it's always clear why we're here.

(There may be a way to turn comments on and off per post. Let me play with it.)

Probably shouldn't let folks post willy nilly. This brings mind the recommendation that newpapers should reorganize to three sections. Front Page: actual news known to be factual. Section Two: Information that has come to our attention, seems plausible, and someone says they will stand by it. Section Three: No idea if this stuff has any truth to it but here you go; but I digress. Material user blog posts asserted to be factual should be researched.

I would like the articles to be factual, authoritative, and sourced; good experience is expertise at some point which makes the information authoritative and is sourced. We can expect to have blog posts that prove to be factual and authoritative. Class Two information is "to the best of our knowledge, can't find a good argument against it, so it might well be worth a shot."

We need to focus on the difference between a discussion forum and a blog. I don't know that composting is a subject that can power a discussion forum. I do know that blogs are often used as a sales tool. Then that brings newsletters to mind. Guess we need to look at the entire universe of options and design a marketing plan that puts the tools and options to best use.

Of course, it would great if we got a lot of user input about what we are presenting; maybe a discussion forum is an option.

Most Recent Article

We could show the most recent article on the home page. Then older content can come into archives, and also be organized onto static pages by topic.

The google checkout widget would be placed in the sidebar and/or onto a static page.

Question: will you want people to be able to comment on our articles? Or just have them send questions that we address in an organized way, presumably building articles around them.

I had to move over to Blogger because I couldn't get Google Checkout Gadget to play nice with WordPress. I like the idea of using a blogging platform for the site, though, because it’s so user-friendly.