Is a Blog Better for You Than a Website ?

Like most things in life, it depends. A website can be a very powerful medium for your message. Websites are more complicated to edit and add information to for the average person, but they are great for graphics once you've uploaded the file to your host. Conventional wisdom at this point in time favors a weblog for most people.

Weblogs or blogs as they are now called are not new as many people think. In 1997, Scripting News and Camworld were blogs. You might also consider the "What's New" page that announced new websites as they were being created back a decade ago as a blog.

In the beginning, blogs consisted of lists of useful and amusing links to other websites. These early blogs could easily be updated. Early on, it became clear that these blogs were a good format for publishing longer articles. A market started to be developed for blog software as their popularity started to increase. The hot topic of 1999 and 2000 was blogs.

The personal home page that was popular for many years is giving way to the blog. People find it easier to just put their information into a blog. It's like a diary, only you write it online. You could put up a little biography about yourself with a collection of articles, but it's more fun to interact with it on a more frequent basis.

The marketing potential of blogs became apparent to businesses as well. They see a blog as a replacement for newsletters. A frequently updated blog gives customers a sense of the business. It allows the business to constantly update and constantly sell whatever product they produce.

Most people who have blogs agree that it is very easy to publish information on the web using their blogs. You don't need to know anything about what's behind the workings like you do with a website. Updating a blog is as easy as posting to a forum or sending an email.

Two big players in the blog game are Google and Wordpress. These are by no means the only two, just two well known and popular ones.

Blogger is the Google owned choice for blogging. You don't install Blogger on your server, you just give it your password and the program will upload the files you give it to your web server for you. You can use Google's servers for free at Blogger's Blogspot if you do not have any hosting.

WordPress is the other popular choice. You install the software on your web server. You then simply log in and type your post. You need to host it on your own server, but it's very simple to set up. Many people have switched from Movable Type, another blogging choice, because of ease of use compared to Movable Type.

In conclusion, I agree with the conventional wisdom that claims that most people would be happier with a blog than with a website. They both satisfy the need of publishing your content to the world be it business and product information or just personal thoughts you wish to tell others.