The Blog v. Website Question

I get asked pretty often about whether I recommend that people have a blog or a website or both … and I'm delighted to say that it's a non-question these days.

Wordpress (and specifically wordpress in the form of Semiologic have made it easy to put create a blog that looks and functions like a website in its own right … with an optional 'blog' section as well.

Now, in reality the whole thing is a blog.  But your web visitors don't need to know that.  (Nor, frankly, do they care.)

There are also some real advantages to having a blogwebsite instead of the old fashioned kind … (and a couple of disadvantages as well.)  I'll just quickly list a couple here.

Advantages

• Software built in
  Blogs have the editing software built in to them, so once it's created, you don't need separate software to edit the pages. Semiologic also includes the ability to do basic graphic editing as well (image cropping, scaling, etc.).  That alone is a great reason to consider the package right there.
• Automatic & Easy Navigation
  When you add new pages, you can easily add them your navigation structure.  When you add new blog posts, they automatically get included in your navigation, so people can easily find what they're looking for.
• SEO friendly
  Blogs do SEO and bookmarking better than any other system, which is why you find so many of them in the search engines.  Now it's a good idea to have a strategy to make use of this, as search engine placement does you no good if you don't have a strategy for capturing the traffic.

Disadvantages

• Time lag
  If you're used to putting up web pages in any other way … blog posting can seem very tedious.  However the advantages probably outweigh this.  You can also write your posts / pages in another system and then simply upload them.
• More complicated to troublshoot
  Because blogs are fairly complex systems … they're more complicated to troubleshoot when something happens.  Again, however, the semiologic community is very responsive and helpful.

That's why I think the Blog v. Website question is a non-question these days.