What is a blog?
I get asked this question all of the time: What is a blog? A blog is a type of website where one page streams information (called blog posts) onto it in a chronological order. It means that there is one page (one URL) that you can visit to see either a flow of new updates, with the most recent at the top.
Many people have a blog which is a stand alone website that shows their posts with a little paragraph about the author. However, in recent years, great platforms such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal have made it very easy to integrate blogs into full websites (my website design is a good example of this). This means that you can have a complete website with a common navigation menu such as home, about, services, portfolio, contact, and testimonials, AND have a blog as one of those pages.
Why do I need a blog?
The answer lies in your intentions for your content or website. Are you trying to build a business website where you want organic traffic from search engines to find your website? Are you looking for improved rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo? Are you sick and tired of waiting on a friend or family member to make updates on your website for you? Do you have regular updates to make to your site but aren’t sure where to add them to your site?
Here are some of the potential benefits of having a blog:
- Blogs provide an easy place for repeat visitors to visit for updates on your site, versus searching through numerous pages for news and additions.
- Blogs allow for you to write regularly on a subject that has relevant keywords for your site and therefore can make your site more “valid” in terms of searches performed by search engines.
- Additionally, blogs allow you to sound more like a human when writing about that same content again and again (as mentioned above) because you can approach the content from different perspectives in different posts versus having to write it all in one very, very long and drawn-out page.
- Blogs can help attract more website visitors who are interested in your content because blogs can be burned as feeds. People can then subscribe to follow your blog through email or an rss reader.
- Once you have a subscriber to your blog, you have a way to remind people you or your business exist on a regular basis.
- Blogs can be edited by you- no need to wait for cousin Frank to get to your edits.
- Blogs integrate easy-to-use text editors so can be understood with little or no training.
- If you need training, blogging platforms such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal all are widely documented with great tutorials throughout the web.
Should I use Blogspot or WordPress/ Joomla/ Drupal?
Are you creating a website for a business to show to (hopefully) thousands of people? Or a person dedicating your blog as a travel blog or showing it only to family? Though others may contend, WordPress/ Joomla/ Drupal hosted on your own hosting account is extremely more flexible than Blogspot for the marketing of a business. Though things may change regularly, the main features as why I prefer self-hosted WordPress/ Joomla/ Drupal for businesses are:
- ability to migrate blogs later
- ability to have more than 10 pages
- integration of independent gallery options where you don’t have to host your images on Picasa
- ability for eCommerce integration
- thousands and thousands of themes and theme options
- thousands of free tutorials
- you host through your own host, not somewhere where you don’t know what they are doing with backups, etc.
- endless storage
- endlessly flexible to support forms, calendars, donation management, event registration, secure online payments, slideshow galleries
Here is some more information about the arguments for and against Blogspot and WordPress. If I were a business owner looking for a new website, though the “free” option of Blogspot sounds tantalizing, it is so limiting that once your business grows, you will need to move your site anyways to support the features of your business.
There are thousands of benefits to having a blog, but choosing the right type of platform is essential. These points will help you to make some good initial decisions and provide inspiration on what you can integrate into your own website design.