Choosing Between a Blog and a Website

There will come a time as a website owner, where you will ask  yourself the question, do I need a blog or a website?  And what’s the main difference?

This question may often be sparked by a frustration you have with managing your website.  You, as a business owner, or website owner, want to focus on what’s important, you don’t want to become bogged down with the peculiarities of internet technology.

So figuring out the basics of what a blog is, compared to a website, will help you determine the easiest path forward for your business or organizational needs.

So What’s The Difference?

In many ways both blogs and websites are very similar.  Both display content(video, audio, text, pictures, etc) on multiple pages, that the search engines can connect to individuals who are looking for that information.

But there are some basic differences.

Blog 101

A blog is organized by dates.  And each posting can be grouped by categories.  Check out these blogs for examples:

Website 101

Although you will have content on a website, they tend to be updated less, and are structured

Advantages to having a blog:

• Easy to set up, add content, and publish.
• You don’t need to be a coder, or deal with a bunch of html, css, php, etc
• Check out blogger.com wordpress.com, and wordpress.org

Disadvantages to having a blog

• It can be difficult to make large scale design changes.
• Not easy to customize, unless you decide to spend the time to learn html, css, and  other design languages.
• Although blogs are easy to set up, it’s going to take hard work to maintain it.

Advantages to having a website

If you learn programs dreamweaver, or just raw code, you have an unlimited amount of flexibility when it comes to design

Although you can update a website with new content often, the pressure to do so, is not as great as what a blog structure implies.

Disadvantages to having a website

There’s a large learning code.  It’s gonna take  you a longer time to become proficient.

Which One Should You Pick?

Well..It depends on what you are going to do with your content.

In fact, you can use both, and probably should.

A blog is best if there is a topic you plan on writing about on a constant basis.  Think about magazines, when you think about blogs.  People subscribe, and are expecting to be given new content from time to time.

No matter which way you go.  Website, blog, or both, you will need to consider what setting it up will entail, and what maintaining it will require.

If you already own a website, then here are some ways to easily manage your content, and a one click solution to setting up a blog as well.

Here’s an article that shows how to edit a traditional website.