What is the difference between a website and a blog?

A blog (a portmanteau of the term “web log”)[1] is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. – wikipedia.org

Blogs (web-log) have been around since the mid 90′s, initially used by journalists and other professionals to log their activities and thoughts. Blogs are now run by individuals and larger companies. They can be used as a powerful marketing tool or simply as a means for the author to off-load their ideas and thoughts. Some blogs will receive 1000′s of hits whilst others hardly make a dent on the interweb at all.

Blogs are a type of website

Not all websites are blogs but all blogs are websites. For most business owners a website will fall into the following categories

1. Brochure website
2. E-commerce websites
3. Blog

There are lots of other types of website as well (including social media, community, wiki, forums and the list goes on).

Chronological content

The single main difference between a blog and your main business website is that a blog is highly focused on chronological content. This means that blog content usually be displayed with the most recent first and folowed by other content in reverse date order.  The content is usually referred to as a post, story, article or ‘a blog’. Common features of blogs are search facilities, categories, tags and comments – all of which help visitors find older posts should they want.

Different types of blogs

Not all blogs look or act in the same way and there are a number of different ways to get blogging.

1. Hosted blog. Sites like www.wordpress.com and www.typepad.com allow users to create blogs in just a few clicks. The blogs are hosted by the wordpress.com servers and whilst this is simple to set up the author is allowed little control over their blog look and feel.  Some blogging benefits like SEO and conversion are poor for hosted blog sites.
2. Installed blogs. Businesses can purchase hosting, domain and then install their own blogging software. For many this might be wordpress.org but there are also a zillion other blogging platforms out there. Depending on the software and the users skills the installed blog can usually be highly customised.
3. Integrated blogs. For many businesses the main reason for setting up a blog is to sell their products and services. And although you need to be careful about how you push your sales – by far the best conversion rates are achieved when the blog is integrated with your main business website. The special thing about the integrated blog/website solution is that your main website menu/look and feel should be incorporated into the blog. Our blog is integrated and as you can see across the top the main website menu is visible and the blog navigation (categories) live on the left of the blog pages only. Integrated blogs can benefit from fantastic conversion rates since visitors are just one click away from the services and products that you are selling – and that’s the main purpose of your blog right?

I am going to be publishing a series of articles this week focusing on blogs. So check back tomorrow to find out “How your business can really benefit from a blog”.