Hi All, I havent seen this thread before but I am pretty new to DP. Would it make much difference to use blog software i.e wordpress or design the pages yourself using dreamweaver or frontpage. I have read time and time again that "content is king". Would google rank you better if you use your own web design or whether you used a blog editor? Hope this makes sense. Thanks Carl
To one extent, FP or DW is a CMS system, maybe more advanced than some. It depends on what you want to actually do. I would recommend probably using FP and then adding a blog as well. That is what I actually do on one of my sites. I use FP to maintain it and the blog script - well I use that to write a few articles.
First off, you can't design your webpages with blog software. The purpose of blog software (or CMS) is to take an existing template and fill in the blanks. The template must be designed by yourself or found pre-made elsewhere. If you design the template yourself you can use any program you want as long as you plug in the blog's specific tags. Second, Google doesn't care who made the design as it has no way of knowing.
i tend o use both i do main content in dreamweaver and have news and stuff through a cms that way its easier to control the look.
google ranks you based on onpage and offpage seo, not web design. tho, i believe it's easier to for search engines to crawl your blog powered pages because blog pages are usually cleaner and easier to craw than say.. DW pages.