Blog or website? What’s the difference?
A website is much larger than a blog. A blog is part of a website and you create a website as a place to post your blogs. An easy way to define a blog is to say that it is a journal that you post online about any topic and it is there for anyone to read.
When you have a blog, you write short articles or post and enter them on a regular basis. The topic is generally the same as the topic of the blog and you present different aspects or points of view in your blog. It is a sort of personal journal, but you do intend it to be public and anyone searching for that topic can read what you have posted. A blog is a series of entries that are dated and are connected in some way to the service the website is offering or the products that are being sold or promoted. A website is a place where you can post blogs and blogs are the content for a website.
Every website on the Internet receives a rating from the search engines. When a searcher enters a search phrase that matches your website in the web browser your site will show up in the search results. The first two pages are the best because then you will get plenty of traffic. However, where your site is in terms of search engine ratings has to do with the quality and quantity of the blogs you post to the site.
There is also a difference between a blog and an article. A blog post provides information in a casual manner as you are just having a conversation with the reader. The posts are written in the first person because it is your opinion that you are expressing. This makes it more personal. A blog usually has a plce where readers can enter comments about the post. If you have a blog and write blog posts on a regular basis, then you are a blogger.
It is not very difficult to create a blog. You only need to know what you are going to write about in each post. There are no tools involved and you don’t need to know HTML. That is not the case with creating a website. You do need to know computer programming language. Creating blogs is so much easier, but in order to post them you do need to have a website.
Both blogs and websites are used by businesses to get their name out among customers and to draw from a much larger market. They also help increase the credibility of the business because it gives the potential more information about the product or service as well as information about where to buy it.
Blogs and websites do have similarities, but they are also different:
- The published content is different in blogs and websites. The content of a blog can be personal, such as a journal of daily activities, book reviews or movie reviews, places to which you have traveled. A website is more formal and you can only post comments or articles that have a relation to the topic of the site. You do need to have some knowledge of computer language to create a website, but you do not need this to create a blog.
- Not everyone has the know-how or the software needed to create a website. Therefore you have to pay to have the site wet up for you and this is very expensive. It costs next to nothing to create a blog and you may even be able to start one for free with the many sites online offering this service.
- With a website you have to purchase a domain name and pay for web hosting. You may have to pay writers to create the content for you. Blogs do not have this extra cost attached to them.
- You do not make major changes to a website once you have it live online, but you can change a blog as often as you wish. A blog is supposed to be updated regularly and are tools to drive traffic to the website.
- With a website the communication flows only one way – you write and the reader reads. With a blog readers can comment on your posts and you can respond so it can develop into a conversation.