Blog or Website – What’s the Difference

Confused by jargon?

Being a web designer and completely immersed in the technical world designing and coding, I sometimes forget that the average person isn’t up to speed on all the jargon in the web world that seems common place to me.

Blogs or Blog Posts?

When I hear people on Facebook referring to the “blogs” they have written, I cringe and want to tell them that a blog is actually the entire site – a collection of articles – and that the “blogs” they are referring to are actually blog posts. You have one blog with multiple blog posts/posts/articles (whatever you like to call them). This is very separate to those people who actually do have multiple blogs (separate sites on separate domain names).

While you can call me pedantic, I think it helps your credibility when you can actually use the correct terminology – you can then be taken more seriously about your area of expertise.

Is a Blog a Website, is a Website a Blog?

The next misunderstanding is between the terms Blog and Website. Recently my sister started a new blog on Tumblr and when I asked her why she didn’t ask me for help to set up a self-hosted WordPress site (because that’s what I do, I make websites), she told me she thought I just did websites not blogs. Well, a blog is a type of website and in fact all the websites I make contain inbuilt blog functionality because all my sites are built on WordPress.

To put it another way, a website is a collection of information online sorted by pages, a blog is also a collection of information, a list of posts/articles, so it too is a website.

Many years ago, before the rise in popularity of WordPress, a blog was something you signed up for with Blogger and wrote about your personal stuff (like an online journal) and if you wanted a website for your business, then you needed to hire a web designer/developer to create a site for you and you were reliant on this developer for all upkeep and any changes required on the site. If you wanted a blog for your business, it had it’s own domain name and was separate from your main site. You can still find sites like this now – this is strange and foreign to me because it’s the fresh content on a blog within your business website that will help you climb the search rankings for your business and get you onto page one of Google for the keywords people would be searching for you on.

With more and more individuals and businesses venturing online, smart, savvy businesses are choosing web developers that create sites on WordPress that integrate their business information with a blog. After all, WordPress is one of the most popular content management system (CMS) and blogging platforms in the world.

What is a “CMS” or content management system?

For the average website user/owner, having a website built on a content management system simply means that they are able to easily update and add content to their site, using an interface similar to a word processor, without ever needing to have any coding experience.

There are many different content management systems available, a few popular, well know platforms such as WordPress and Joomla, and others are small custom built systems. The beauty of WordPress is that it’s open source (which effectively means all the code is available for anyone to look at and use to develop custom solutions). WordPress is also free (that’s right – you can download the WordPress platform for use on your site for free) and it has a large developer community very passionate about building, refining and advancing the capabilities of the platform. That is the beauty and benefit of using WordPress over other custom built small solutions, there is excellent support for the platform and constant innovation.

Over the years, WordPress has grown from being used just as a blogging platform, to a full featured powerful CMS used on popular business websites such as Mashable, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others (see more sites at the WordPress showcase).

Why do I use WordPress (self-hosted)?

This is really a topic for a whole post on its own so I’ll outline briefly.

I use self hosted WordPress as the basis for all my client websites because it gives me the flexibility to build you a personal blog for your daily thoughts, an authority blog for you to build expert status in your industry, or a business website to promote your products and services and anything in between.

If you were to start on a free hosted solution like Blogger, when your popularity, traffic and readership grows, your creativity may be flourishing but your ability to expand will be stifled. You’ll be faced with having to move all your posts and reader comments to a new platform, reconfiguring all your internal links and your page urls and you’ll have to create a new design (or have your current one replicated) on your new platform. Not a fun (or cheap) process that can potentially lead to losing your content.

While I hesitate to say there is a right way of getting started, I truly do believe (at this point in time) that creating your blog or website is best done on a self-hosted installation of WordPress on your own domain. And if you’re concerned about the startup costs for WordPress (not including the design of the site itself) then read “Budgeting for your new blog or website” and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.