Website Vs. Blog – What to Choose?
If it’s a quick answer that you’re looking for, then a blog is actually a non-static (dynamic) website that you can use without much or even any knowledge of programming, making it easy to use and regularly update. A blog concentrates on ease for the blog-maker, and the ability for viewers to comment, making a blog more interactive. Everything is done online and you don’t need to start up a server or even hire a server farm to keep your blog running. It’s free and without obligation. A website is a static port where users come primarily to browse information. The interaction done on it is mostly for commercial or business purposes, like buying an album or auctioning off a second-hand bike. A blog tends to organize content according to date, placing the latest entry on the top, while a website allows you to organize your content however you want.
Website or Blog: Making the Right Choice
The complications in understanding manifest when you see websites that include forums and blogs that look so much like websites. The thing is, both are still pages on the Internet, used for a multitude of purposes, but mostly for earning money and trading. Follow the table given to learn more on the differences that, no matter how minor, eventually will affect your decision in the long run.
Websites Vs. Blogs
Pro-Blog
Setting up a blog is way faster and easier. You potentially start earning the moment you get done with the start up process, with good content comes good income.
Websites take a longer time to get started, mostly because of the page building process. They also require money to start up and to maintain, while blogs remain free to a certain extent. If you are serious about blogging as a source of income, you need to put some money into it too.
A blog is a basic Content Management System (CMS), rather your Content Management. You can go and update your blog anytime you want to, no hassles with any technician anywhere. You only need knowledge of operating WordPress, which, by my belief, is doable by anyone’s standards.
A website does basically belong to you, but there can be problems whenever you want to update it. If you have a contract with a server farm, you will have to follow their guidelines.
Blogs dominate Google searches because they are rich in content, which is what Google loves. So blogs are always on page 1, the rest everywhere else.
Not true. This is a myth that may feel true to you only because there have been a lot of blogs popping up from all around the globe, much faster than a website can. But that doesn’t mean websites are weak. It is a common misconception to say that since Google likes to chew on rich words, they place blogs above websites. Well, content is the creation of the maker, not the site or blog. Try some test searches for random stuff and you’ll see that blogs aren’t popular everywhere.
Blogs get tons of functional themes that you can change anytime you want. Blogs also get all the plugins in the world at the click of the mouse.
A website may be placed on someone else’s server, but it’s yours to create and change. It’s all in the coding, and if you’re good at it, you can make your site shine without any prescribed themes. The only place websites are weaker is large-scale content modification. You pretty much have to strip down the site and build it up again if you need to make some major makeover.
Pro-Website
If you need to put up content that isn’t words as much as its pictures, software and forums, websites win. They are much more flexible to accommodate the above three aspects and ones similar to them.
Blogs don’t have so much flexibility on that part. If you need intensive design ideas to be put up, with long and complicated descriptions of them in pop-up panels or something like that, blogs pretty much fail. Blogs are, however, much more adept at content modification than websites.
Websites are much more stable than blogs. Content that’s created on the website, stays there and keeps generating steady income for any trade or web traffic that comes your way. In fact, a website starts to get more hits if it stands up for some years, eventually starting to climb the Google search ladder. There can be seen many websites that have started out in 2002 and 2003 that are still on page 1, whereas blogs have only been in the business since around 2005 and 2006.
Blogs do need content to run on. If you stop supplying content to it, your income pretty much stops. If you supply crappy content to your site just to keep it going, you’ll get lower hits and consequently, lower income. It’s hard for something like this to compete with websites that have solid content and that dominate search results.
Websites are better for all marketing purposes. Product display, manufacturing process, price tags and discounts, distributor details are some of the things that are easier shown on a website than a blog.
Yes, it is hard to do something like this on blogs, where you need a constant source of information to keep updating.
This should help you decide what you want now. In my opinion, stick to blogs if your content is personal or social. Use a website for all business purposes and also if you want the page to last in the long run.