What is Better, Create a Website or a Blog ?
Posted by Spyros Panagiotopoulos in General Website Creation Tips, tags: Blog Creation, build blog, build website, choose blog, choose website, website creation
One of the very first question the new webmaster faces is whether it is better to create a blog or a website as their first webmastering attempt. I wanted to be pretty versatile while answering this question.
As you will soon find out yourself getting more and more experienced on the subject, there is not really a straightforward answer to that question. In fact, one could choose one or other and like it the same. However, i want to make it as easy it can get to decide what best suits you. Therefore, i will be giving you arguments on what it better on a website and what is better on a blog and then you can more easily make up your mind on what to choose.
What Are The Advantages of a Blog ?
1. Blogs are easier to drive traffic to
There are a couple of reasons why blogs work better in getting you traffic. First of all, there are hundreds of resources over the internet that allow you to submit your blog and easily be indexed. One of the most well known ones is technorati, at which website-creation-tips is also registered at. These kinds of submissions most times bring referring traffic to your blog and while it is true that such indeces exist for websites too, it seems that blog networks are far better at getting you traffic.
2. Blogs Are Easier to Setup
It is certainly true that blogs are far easier to setup as a whole when compared to websites. Nowadays, most web hosting companies offer free Wordpress or other blog platform installations for free and in a matter of minutes. Even if you have to set your blog up yourself, it is really a very easy 5 steps process as you can see that for Wordpress .
3. Blogs Are Free
What’s even better, the best and most well known blog platforms are totally free.
4. Blog Plugins Are Free Too
Notonly the blogs alone, but their best plugins are also absolutely free. This is very important for end users because blog platforms enhanced functionalities really depend on these plugins.
What Are The Disadvantages of a Blog ?
1. They Are Difficult to Edit
An important drawback of blogs is the difficulty in making custom changes. Let’s say, for instance, that a user would like to change the footer of a website and add images and more. They would have to edit the blog’s html code directly in order to achieve that.
2. If Not Well Setup, Blogs Can Suffer High Bounce Rates
Bounce Rate is a percentage indicating how much people dig inside your website posts. For instance, a rate of 80% means that people just visit your website in order to read a post once in a while but do not dig any deeper. On the contrary a rate of 40% means that people tend to read more parts of your website.
Of course, the latter is what you would like to achieve in order to get visitors that are really interested in what you say. When you first setup a blog, it is quite certain that your bounce rates will be high because the nature of a blog is that recent posts are only shown in first page and others are just archived.
Luckily, this is something that we can easily fix. Adding plugins for “related posts” or maybe “popular posts” is one of the best ways to commit your visitors to read more and lower your bounce rates.
3. Blogs Do Not Typically Offer User Registrations
The typical nature of blogs is that a single person creates posts or some other people offer some guests posts too. This can be a disadvantage over websites that allow people to register and better communicate. However, maybe a forum or some plugins can balance that problem in some cases.
These are some of the things that you need to notice if you would like to create your first blog. Let’s now take look on what websites are good for and what they are not that good for.
What Are The Advantages of a Website ?
1. Websites Typically Offer More Options to the Visitor
Websites are most times created in such a way that a visitor has many options. Instead of wandering through various posts that a blog consists of, websites have different sections for anybody to wander and can therefore be more enticing to the new visitor.
2. Websites Are Easier to Edit
Unless you have chosen to use a known Content Management System like Drupal or Joomla, it’s certain that your website will be a bit easier to edit. This occurs because CMS like Drupal or Wordpress for blogs have overbloated code that is difficult to customize the way you would like to. Therefore, simple websites doing just what you want them to do and not offering vast plugins can certainly more easily be edited.
3. Websites Can Be Free
Although Blogs are typically marked as free website creations, websites can as well be free. For instance, creating a website with Drupal is like creating a blog with Wordpress and has no overall costs.
4. Websites Look a Bit More Professional
Though it is not what happens in reality, it is true that websites do look a bit more professional over blogs. After all, blogs where created to be personal online diaries. They have certainly evolved to better systems that people can utilize for creating things from an online diary to a business. However, sublimately, a website still stands as a more professional means to communicate with others and certainly looks more like an online business.
What Are The Disadvantages of a Website ?
1. Websites Are Harder to Create
When compared to blogs, websites are certainly harder to create. Even if you use a CMS, building a websites needs much more configuration and will take much more time to complete when compared to a simple blog setup.
2. Most Websites Do Not Offer Ready Made Plugins
Creating a website does not offer you already made plugins for “related posts”, “rss feeds” and more. However, CMSs do contain plugins that can do the work for you but their main drawback is that they are not as easily configured as the corresponding blog ones.
3. Websites Do Not Always Give a Sense Of Progress
Blogs do give the sense of time progression and look more up to date when compared to plain websites. This happens because blog posts contain date information and RSS Feeds for blogs also make it feel like it is always changing. On the other hand, websites are more static in content and this could make a visitor think that they are no longer updated.
Of course people may agree or disagree with what i said above. However, i tried to provide you with information that could help you decide which one to create and it’s certain that some would think otherwise. It would be nice to listen to what you have to say about that. Which do you prefer? A website or a blog ?
Random Posts
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Entries (RSS)
Spyros, nice, thorough post. I would only add that besides Drupal and Joomla there are a lot of services out there that let you create a free website and are aimed at people who don’t know that much about programing, for example Edicy (the company I work for), Weebly, Yola, etc.
If you do create a website I’d still recommend having a blog as well, in order to make your site easier to find it’s good when there is content that changes.
Totally disagree!!
Seriously, if you do not know how to fiddle with HTML etc then a blog is much better!