Blog or Web Site: Which One is for Me?
I often get asked about the best way to set up a new Web site. By far the question I hear most often is, “Should I have a blog or a web site or what?”
What they should be asking me though is, “How should I manage and maintain my web site?”
To answer that, it’s important to understand the difference between a blog and a site.
A blog at its most simple, is a web page run off a platform that allows easy updates as often as you want. A web site, for purposes of this discussion, is a collection of web pages. On your company’s site at company.com, you can have an “About” page, a “Resume” page, a “Portfolio” page, and a page for anything else you want to put out in the world.
Now here’s where the dilemma comes in: A blog can be a page of page on your full web site and or you can use it as the interface for the whole thing.
Both options have their benefits. I use this blog as a piece of my site because I like the flexibility having a full-fledged site offers me. Individual pages can easily do different things, but all share the site’s look and feel. Adding pages may take a bit more work and I needed a web designer to make my site look good, but I am someone who likes to be able to control my web presence more than most so it was a fair trade off for me. Also, having a full site doesn’t obviate the use of a blog (obviously) and in fact, increases how it can be used (I feed parts of each post to my main page, for example).
On the other hand, using a blog to manage a site does have one huge advantage. Blog management tools are very user friendly. A user chooses what links to include, where to put them, what the basic design should be and clicks a few buttons. Voila! You’ve got a web site. If you choose to put a new page on your site, creating one is as easy as navigating to the right place, putting in the new content, and hitting “Publish.” Even adding graphics and other media to a new page is as easy as attaching a Word document to an email.
The biggest reason most people use a blog platform to manage their site though is design. Most blog platforms such as Blogger and WordPress have legions of users who create free templates that you can implement with just a few clicks. Throw in a bit of HTML know-how and you can even tweak that design to your heart’s content.
A full web site, on the other hand, lets you start from a blank page. That gives you all sorts of design and functional flexibility a blog can take away (serious coding skills and small programs called plug ins can return them), but demands that you know what you’re doing, or hire someone who does.
There is no right or wrong answer in the end. You need to ask yourself how you want to use your site and your blog, how you want them to interact and how you want to interact with them. Of course, I’m happy to help you suss these questions out personally.
Look for future posts on questions people have when starting their sites and feel free to ask me if you have a specific one.
Image comes from WikiMedia Commons and is credited to STyx.
Liked This Article? Please Bookmark It!
StumbleUpon