One question that pops up all the time and is always a valid question is “Should I have a website or a blog”. This is easily answered by those in the know and the reasons for such an answer are over whelming.

First of all let’s make one thing clear, a blog is a website, in fact it can better be called a dynamic website. In the early days of blogging a blog looked like a blog and it was easy to recognize it. Now, with the development and constant improvement of blog themes and templates, it is virtually impossible to tell them apart. Traditional websites are known as static websites.

Blog is short for web log and is a constantly updating content managing system (CMS) arranged in reverse chronological order with the most recent update or post showing at the top, just below the site header. Visitors to your site will immediately see your most recent post as your site opens.

Once your blog is up and running you can add text, audio and video almost immediately and equally edit your posts just as quickly. Compared to this traditional websites are slow and tedious to publish and maintain. Once you are familiar with blog software and themes then you can easily manually install a new blog in minutes.

Blogs originated as ‘web logs’ or online diaries for enthusiasts to record and make public their day to day activities. The benefits of blogs soon became apparent and now more and more people, webmasters online businesses and companies use blogs for their websites.

It is much easier to optimize your site for the search engines with a blog.
With the way that blogs are designed and with the use of add on ‘plugins’ they are much better optimized and are found and indexed much more quickly by the search engines than static websites. Blogs show up much more often in organic searches than static websites. By default blogs are updated more often, search engines will crawl them easily and they love fresh content.

Each time you post to your blog you do, automatically, what is known as ‘pinging’ the update services. Pinging is the process of letting search engines and other sites know that new content has been added with an invite for them to come and take a look. This facility is not available with static sites.

Blogs allow you to interact with your readers and get their feedback since blogs give you the option of enabling a comments field to your posts to allow for feedback which gives you the chance to interact with your readers and add extra content to your blog.

Blogging software is free to download as are many themes or templates to make your blog more individual. As with many things, better quality and optimized themes cost money and are known as premium themes. However, there is no need to buy these themes as many are freely available. Blogs can be hosted for free but it is better to pay for your own hosting to have more control and hosting can be had for less than $8 per month.

For the cost of purchasing a domain name for $9 and paying your first month’s hosting fee you can get your first blog site up and running for $17. It can be cheaper than that infact but it is not reccommended to go down the road of free hosting and domain names. I will be writing more on this in another post.

Bloggers establish credibility faster than static site owners because blogs build a stronger and dynamic knowlegebase. As a blog is a CMS content is found much more easily than navigating through a static site.

Blogs have so many advantages, some mentioned above and some more advanced that they will be touched on in later posts, that it is no wonder that blogs are the websites of choice. One blog system, known as WordPress, stands head and shoulders above all other. Users of other systems might not agree with this, but I do and from now on all reference to blogging and CMS means WordPress and that is what I will be concentrating on.

Before I finish this article I would just like to mention that if you already have a static website do not despair as a blog can easily be added to you website with all the advantages that it can bring.