By Admin
You might find yourself posing this question when you go to set up your new site on your web host? Is it better to go for a traditional, static website or use a blog for your site? It’s a question that gets asked over and over again, and it’s time we put this to rest, at least here.
A blog IS a website. It’s a dynamic website, able to quickly add and edit content as fast as you can type, and without the services of an expensive programmer who may be able to get to it sometime late next week (Or not!). Blogs have many advantages over traditional HTML static sites, not the least of which is the ability to make changes on the fly, add content on a moment’s notice, engage your site visitors, and more. In fact, one of the only uses for a large HTML site anymore may be for an ecommerce site with a large catalog of items. However, you could still make a case for using a blog in that case as well.
Many people ask this question as there seems to be a view of blogs as trivial, not professional, and something of a fad – like they might soon fade away. None of this could be further from the truth. With a little customization, your blog (site) will look indistinguishable from any other website. And in fact, because of the nature of blogs, may look a great deal better. There are an infinite number of ways to enhance your blogs, such as is the case with any WordPress blog. There are literally hundreds of useful “plugins” (which in HTML parlance would translate to scripts) that can help render content on your blog from videos to images, to RSS feeds displaying up to the minute news and content in your market from around the Web, and so much more.
The ability to stay in touch and interact with your website visitors is a huge advantage when using a blog. Whereas with a static site they would be forced to search out a way to contact you (probably via email) on your blog they can simply leave a comment on your post, or subscribe to your feed, or participate in any polls or other user generated content you’ve got set up.
Not only does this help you stay close to your visitors, it helps with things like branding, building relationships, seeking help with problems, finding potential partners and more.
Another huge advantage to a blog is that they are a great deal easier to optimize for SEO. You can create custom permalinks, silo your blog for relevance, utilize tags, involve social media in your posts, employ your pages RSS feeds to help get pages indexed and popular, along with using things like trackbacks and pingbacks to help with linking.
Setting up a blog is not hard to do, and can be learned by a novice. You may want to customize a bit to set yours apart from the crowd, but this is also not so hard and can easily be outsourced.