Happy One Year Anniversary to our....BLOG!

By:  Ashleigh

Many businesses have "webmasters" and other companies that design and maintain their websites.  When Dr. Jones bought this practice in late 2008, the first thing that she did was set up a webpage so that patients had a way to find us online.  Online web presence is important, especially for small businesses.  People go to the Internet everyday to look up products, places, and end heated debates about movie trivia.  Frankly, if I am looking up a business and they do not have a good website, or none at all, I usually go to the next place.  In the past, people would go to the place to form their own opinion.  In this day and age, people will review other peoples' reviews to see if it is something they want to further investigate.

Dr. Jones put together a website and maintained it herself for the first couple years.  As we've become busier (and she added children to her family), I slowly took over the website to make sure that it is up-to-date and has relevant content.  In early 2013, we played around with the idea of having a dental blog.  A blog is a personal website or web page on which an individual records opinions, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis.  It was important to us that we make all the blog posts not only informative, but a little funny and humorous.  I really wanted to call the blog, The Sarcastic Dentist...but as our British grandmother always said, "Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit."

On September 16, 2013, we published our first blog!  As excited as I was, I also felt a little nervous.  Will we run out of topics?  Are people going to read the posts?  Will the grammar police call me out for the prepositions at the end of my sentences?

Because we maintain this website ourselves, we also have access to see how many people visit our website and the pages that they are reading.  It was amazing to see the positive response!  We went from having an average of 30-50 people visit the website daily to over 200 visits daily!  Many of those visits are blog views!  Number two on my list of fears (Will people read the blog?) is now crossed off my list.  And thankfully, people are being very kind and not commenting on my writing mistakes :)

As for running out of topics, we are still coming up with them.  The only "hard" part is keeping the balance between humor and information.  I've been trying to write a post about dental "insurance" for the last year.  I've started at least 6 different drafts, but let's face it...dental "insurance" isn't the most humorous topic.  My goal is to finally publish an insurance related post by the end of the year.

As always, if there is a topic that you would like for us to cover, please feel free to email us at info@alisonjonesdentistry.com.

We hope that you've been enjoying the posts and thank you for the time you take to read them!