Website vs Blog – What’s the difference?

Blog vs a Website … which one should to choose?

A blog IS a website. In fact, I want to take that a stage further and say that blogs are “dynamic” websites. You can have pages on a blog and, with some of the great blog software on the market today, it can sometimes be difficult to tell some blogs and websites apart.  

For those of you who may not know what a blog is, it’s short for web log, and is a frequently updated website consisting of blog posts, or entries (more often than not, dated entries) that are arranged in reverse chronological order. So when a reader comes to your blog, they see your most recent article or post first.

The advantage of a blog is that blogs allows you to post written text, audio and video and have it online within minutes, unlike traditional static websites which can take hours to update and cost you each time – unless you’re familiar with building or editing web sites.

Optimizing Your Site For The Search Engines is Much Easier With a Blog

Each time you publish a blog, you do what is called “pinging” the update services. In other words, you automatically notify the search engines (sometimes indirectly) that there is new content on your site so “come and take a look!” This gives the search engines occasion to come and visit your site to index it. So, another benefit is that blogs tend to be indexed much more often than traditional static websites and, blogs show up 10 times more often in organic searches than static websites do.

A website is really anyplace you can visit online with URL (domain) and allows you to view content. So essentially EVERYTHING on the internet is a website!

Blogs were created to have a simple interface and post thoughts and ideas in chronological order typically down the middle of the page, with the newest content at the top of the page.

Blogs are dynamically built using a content management system (CMS). A content management system is a collection of tools and scripts designed to allow the creation, modification, organization and removal of information from a website. Using a CMS requires an user to have no HTML or coding knowledge to get started.

Over the years the look and feel of blogs have morphed to resemble static websites and by adding extensions or plugins, a user can expand their blog and offer thousands of features.

So the best choice for your website (regardless of the type), is to start by using a blog CMS as a foundation, then add specific features based on the purpose of your website and be sure to add static pages of relevant information that is easy to find. Essentially a hybrid between the two.

So why are blogs better than normal websites?

Creating a blog style website is actually the quickest and simplest way to get your online message noticed. Lets be honest, you want to create a website to either be heard (or have your message read) or you are trying to sell something. Regardless of whether your web space is just an online platform to voice your opinions or a stage for venting and ranting or on the other hand a commercial endeavor the fact remains that you need an online audience to give your efforts any kind of meaning.

Blogs get indexed quickly by search engines and websites don’t. The ultimate goal of your website is to gain traffic from search engines (also known as organic traffic) because it’s the best kind of traffic to get. Blogs have an huge advantage over websites because due to their dynamic nature (meaning the content changes regularly on the homepage) they get favored attention from search engines. This favored attention means that search engine spiders (the creepy crawly scripts that scour millions of websites daily for information) keep returning to crawl your blog more than they would a static site.

New content added to a blog is instantly viewable and picked up by search engines! The single most defining feature of a blog is the frequency of updated content on the homepage (or the index page). New content on a blog is by default added to the homepage of the blog at the top. So the very first per of information a search engine spider encounters on a blog is the newly added content, which if you are not aware, is like honey to a bee.

Optimizing your site for the search engines is far easier with a blog. Ever time you write a new post (new content) on to your blog, you do something called “pinging” the update service. You are notifying the search engines that you have new content on your site. The search engines will visit your site and index your site more often than a static website. Blogs will also show up many times more often in organic searches than a regular website.

It is much cheaper to set up a blog and maintain the site than it is for a static website. This will probably be #1 on most of your lists.

As a small business owner you may now be thinking, which option to go for?

•      Have a website and a separate blog
•      Have a blog as the company website
•     Import a blog into an existing website.

If you are just getting started, a self-hosted blog is the best option to help promote your business online.  If you are starting from scratch, I suggest using WordPress.org, with your own hosting package.  What I like about WordPress is that is designed to have both static pages and blog pages.  

If you already have a website,  you could add a blog section to and  it can be a  great way to update your online presence, and bring more traffic to your existing site.

To set up your blog based website , I recommend getting some help.  An expert can help you build your online home from hosting to customisation of your  blog and help using  the blog platform.

Hope you found this post useful, and if you need help with WordPress please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Best Wishes