Blog or website
At some point when thinking about your website you are going to be confronted with the choice - do you build a ’static’ website or a blog. Or both. Is there a difference, and does it matter?
In very broad terms it will depend on the subject of your site. Perhaps it is easies to think of a static site as a series of statements from you to the world in general, while a blog is a conversation, changing with time and inviting feedback from site visitors.
So a site stating the events of the Punic Wars might be a static site, and a news commentary site might be better as a blog. If new and current events are continually being posted a blog is likely to be preferable.
That all sounds simple enough. And so it is, except…it is possible and easy to build a ‘normal’ site using blog software such as wordpress. This blog section of bigtangle could easily be arranged as a fixed site rather than a blog, and perhaps should be. I intend to keep posting information, updates and changes as time goes by, and the world develops, which is one of the reasons it isn’t.
Blogs can even have a ‘fixed page’ as the front page - so it looks even more like a ‘fixed’ website. For example the site www.france-renovation.com which is a static site ‘disguised’ as a blog, (or perhaps it is a blog disguised as a static site). This structure enables visitors to easily provide comment and feedback.
Other advantages of the most popular blogs - blogger and wordpress - are that they are set-up for you, easy to use, and don’t need web development software on your PC. Large numbers of attractive templates are available. If your hosting company supports ‘Fantastico’ you don’t even need to upload the files for Wordpress - a couple of clicks and it is all done for you.
There is also often the suggestion that blogs are indexed faster and more efficiently by the search engines than other sites. This also seems to be my experience, but I can’t confirm it for certain, or guess why it might be the case.
So why does anyone have an ‘old-fashioned’ site? Once set-up they are easy to maintain, and can be left unchanged, there is more flexibility on appearance and design, and they are more suitable, as I said above, for sites where the content really is just factual statement, with no expectation or desire to communicate with site visitors.
There is one more common option - have both! A popular choice is to have a static website for the unchanging elements of the ‘business’ and a separate blog, probably promoted separately, for the changing aspects of the business. So if I have a static site about, say, hotels in Barcelona, I could have a separate blog about current events in Barcelona, and use that blog to send potential customers to the main site. This kind of setup is suitable for a lot of businesses.