website or blog? recommendations appreciated

[ydesignsx™]

ponybarn5,

I know you are getting a lot of recommendations to start with a Wordpress first. However, it sounds to me that you want to create your own design. If this is the case do both. Make sure your web host has WP integration. Design your site while working on your blog theme. You can use your static site to work on your design and still post on your blog. As you become more comfortable with the WP CMS, you can integrate your design to your WP blog later. There are lots of tutorials online to help you.

Good Luck!

[jonbey]

The biggest area of weakness of any of the online systems is that you have to remember to run backups every time you change something or risk losing that change if anything happens to your site.

Many MySQL CMS's such as Wordpress have modules to automatically create a database backup at regular intervals, and some allow to email you too. So backups are not a problem with Wordpress.

[Fre420]

There's no way to answer that question with the information you provide...

• What is your goal ?
• What is your bussiness ?
• What information do you want to share ?
• What is your Internet Strategy ? (OK don't give this out publicly, but maybe the general lines)

The choice to have a blog or a normal website can be influenced by the following:

• How frequently you want to post information (the same type of ...) ?
• Is your product common? (buy it once in a lifetime vs buy it every month)
• How difficult is your product & how much will potential customers search for information? (Do the potential customers need to do a lot of research before they get the value of your product, or have enough information to make confident buy decisions ?)
• How will you design your content & how do the different topics relate to each other? (information design & structure + findability)
• How do you want to keep your potential readers up to date of new content?
• ...

First make your goals & internet strategy, then choose the best way to publish it on the internet.
Just asking whether to have a blog or website without any real information provided, will just give non-targeted answers.

[mark1230]

i would suggest you to go for a good keyword supported domain and then add wordpress software and start your blog , blogs are good if you can update them

[mike-spencer]

I agree with Duzero, its always fun to have a website. for learning sake & its more commercial...

[austk]

There are many ways to create a web site these days, but there are not many that are easier to setup and maintain than a blog. I would start a blog, they are good for search engines since they are created with consistent tags and so forth. If you do not want to post updated info, I would stick with a regular site.

[gita]

A wordpress blog. It beats anything out there. Get a self hosted site.
I have many HTML static sites. I am changing all of them to Wordpress sites - the reasons being.

Easy to use
Lots of support
Free themes
Good traffic
Google sends love

HTML sites are dinosaurs. You will have to upgrade at a later stage anyway.

[ponybarn5]

>>>Get a self hosted site.

What is a self hosted site?

[ponybarn5]

By the way, thanks to everybody for their time in helping me with all this advice!

The only thing I would add is that in the future, if someone should advise a newbie to go get WordPress or whatever software with a difficulty similar to it, tell them they should have it installed by someone else. I'm over it now but I'd hate to see anyone else spend over two hours on a "Famous, Easy 5-minute Install."

Thanks again!

[kikykuang]

Use a website to do a blog, i think that waste resource.
you can use a free interspace to write a blog.

[varunbihani]

I recommend a blog as it is easy. You can update it date and time wise, receive comments... but keep the control always!

[ponybarn5]

Hi! Thanks!

What do you mean by keep the control?

[varunbihani]

did i miss that?

Always have control over the conversations and moderate the comments you receive...

[itop10]

Based on my personal experience, i would recommend a blog. Reasons:

1) Blog is easy to setup then developing a website.
2) Blog is easy to maintain as compared to website.
3) Blog will not cost you as compared to websites.

Yes, if you get popular & good traffic then you should go for website because that gives you more power. But right now to start with I would recommend blog.

[gita]

"self hosted" - what I meant was host it on a hosting company server. You get the hosted wordpress version - like blogger. All you do is created an account with WP and you start blogging.

This way you will own your domain and later if you want you can sell it.

Sorry to hear you found the install hard. It does get easier as you go.

[fcolor]

When say blog, most people mean a blogging CMS such as Wordpress, b2Evolution and etc. When you create a website on blogging platform you save time and money, but of course you are limited the functionality that the blogging CMS provides.

The are content management such as MODx, Drupal, Joomla and etc that have extended functionality. I would suggest you to use one of those. Drupal and Joomla have more design skins and more options. MODx is an excellent framework to develop websites.

[techvb]

Come to the basic question about blog or website.
Theoretically speaking a website generally has static content,for example, information about a company and is not updated on a day to day basis.As you say 'the site will be informational only'-decide on the point that do you want to update that information on a timely manner.
For example you can make a site about HTML,where you put the tutorial.It'll be static web site.Now if you want to make a site which gives "latest tricks on HTML" then it's better to make a blog on which you update it as you come to know new tricks.
Example- w3schools is a website, smashingmagazine is a blog.
hope it helps to decide.

[ponybarn5]

Yes, techvb. This is definitely helpful. Thank you!

[ussearch]

If your soon-to-be site is for informational purposes only, consider this.

The most important part of your site is the content (as in, not trying to land sales or anything else) -- you want people to be able to access that with ease.

With a non-blog website, you will have to do a lot of informational design to make it so readers can find the information they are looking for.

With a blog, you have tags, and categories, and other archiving methods, which are much more dynamic than on a non-blog site. That means that people can organize articles by topic, keywords, date, etc.

So given that, I would recommend a blog. It's more dynamic and if you set it up right, it's easier to navigate.

[ponybarn5]

Again, more excellent advice! Thank you!

I think if anyone loses their faith in humanity, they should just ask a question on this forum/this site.

So thanks again. I think I have enough now, but don't let that stop you if you have another idea.

[jonbey]

Did anyone mention RSS feeds? Make a blog, set up RSS feed subscriptions, which will then email updates to subscribers. Good way of keeping readers informed. Feedburner is a good way to handle this.

[jemich2128]

I am trying to start a blog, I have posted a blog on a site, My question is how do people view my blog? do they have to go to the website or can they use the search engine, I am really wanting to buy a website but i thought I would i would start by making a blog? is that the right way to go?
any information would be great thanks

[TabloidInternet]

I used wordpress for my general blog and blogger or the mirror blog.

[sky2k4]

We just went public last month and have been a behind the scenes company,

Well we decided to use a wordpress blog instead of an actuall website or Joomla,

Withing the 3rd week we had a pagerank of three for our homepage and now have a pagerank of two for our contact page,

Blogging just makes it easier to utilize all the tools needs for keywords and for meta, and web 2.0.

Some Blogger platforms actually can hold you back if you dot know what your doing.

[clyd3robert]

I agree with stepeh. "You don't have to make a blog into a web site since a blog already is a web site." back 2 years ago I run with websites and I was frustrated after six months of SEO campaign none of them got revenue in my google adsense program. A professional blogger friend advice me why dont I try a blog. So after that day I created a blog in my old domain, though i was still newbee using wordpress as my blog flatform. Man I was fascinated after the my 3 weeks my earn is boosting, my impression is getting kick, my visitor is dawrning. After that I was addicted into blogging compared to static website. And now I am a succesfull blogger. I run several blogs and do SEO. This is my experience compared blog and site.