A friend of mine is getting ready to launch a new ministry in the Italian Alps, seeking to help facilitate people's connection with God through experiences in the great outdoors (it sounds like a really great initiative, which is really starting to pick up steam).  To support this new endeavor, he's launched a new website:  www.intothewilderness.eu.  And knowing about my personal hobbies, he recently asked me for some advice about blogging and website development.  Certainly, I'm not an expert in these things, and I told my friend that I didn't really have any polished, succint listing of tips that I've picked up through the years.  But I did have a few scattered ideas that might be helpful.  And I thought I might share this list here in this space as well.  Here are a few of the random thoughts that came to my mind:

• Quantity of posting is more important than quality of posting:  When it comes to generating web traffic and maintaining followers, it's important to post more often than to ensure that "the perfect post" is sitting there, waiting for readers.  The major search engines refer queries to the most recent posts on a given topic -- so it's important to always have something fresh.  I generally post 10-18 times per month (although I know other, more serious bloggers who do it much more frequently!).
• Use simple language expressing sincere thoughts and emotions, more than trying to maintain any slick PR presence.
• Encourage comments and make a point to regularly respond to comments (within the comment section of the blog itself), so people will keep coming back to carry on the dialogue within your web space.
• Write about stuff that's meaningful to you:  a sweet spot you found to go fly-fishing… photographs from the excursions… specific, personal, bullet-point highlights from the excursions (i.e. "that morning when Alessandro fell into the river")… sharing the joys of the wilderness with your children… a great prayer time that you had while hiking through the mountains… These are just a few guesses of things that you might be able to write about.  But it's most important that the material be interesting for you -- not what you think might be interesting for your readers.  This is the only way you'll be able to keep up any frequency of posting, and oddly enough this is what makes a blog most interesting to follow.
• Use a lot of sensory cues when you write (what things smelled like, tasted like, felt like, sounded like, looked like).
• Keep your posts short (500 words or less).
• If you don't feel like you're really going to be able to keep up a blog (at least one post per week), I would recommend that you just scrap the blog idea and keep it to being a sort of on-line, electronic brochure (which has its own usefulness).  A lifeless blog is worse than having no blog at all.

What do you think of these tips?  Would you agree with my advice, or would you contradict any of my suggestions?  Are there any other random tips that you would add to such a list?  It's interesting for me to note that I don't always stick to my own ideals, when it comes to blogging!  But these are at least interesting things to think about... I'd be very curious to get feedback from anyone else who might have his or her own opinions and experiences in these matters (and if anything good comes up, I'll pass it along to my friend, too!).