Dedicated To Video Bloggers Everywhere

Hi Ann,

There are varying theories and sometimes it depends on the business. But here’s a few thoughts that I have.

Websites can be more time consuming to edit and add information to but they are great for graphics. Websites also give you the ability to take payments right on the site which may be more difficult to set up on a blog.

With regard to customer service a website may be a better medium for when someone has a question about a product or is having trouble accessing something on your site. You can also leave comments on a blog but websites offer a more professional look and feel.

Visitors looking for information sometimes prefer blogs over websites because the posts and articles are generally short and arranged in categories for quick browsing. Also with RSS it’s a lot more convenient for readers to subscribe to blogs and get quick updates. You can setup an RSS feed for a regular website, but you will have to code the XML yourself or buy software to do it for you.

Search engines like blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis, particularly if your blog get plenty of comments. You can also capitalize on the huge amount of social media and bookmarking sites to promote your blog.

I would say that blogs are a better medium for news or content . Blogging software such as Wordpress does a superb job of managing content for you. It’s also much easier to maintain and update. On the other hand, if you have an e-commerce business whereby you are selling goods and services then a static website may be a more appropriate option.

If you are on the fence about what to do, I have seen some businesses successfully create both. You can use a blog as an extension of your main site. For example, you can use your blog to make simple comments or illustrations or to make a specific point in a more casual style. You can use your blog as a daily or weekly journal of quick posts related to your main website while your main website can be a place for displaying your products, taking orders, providing customer service and hosting more in-depth articles and tutorials. Use can also use each to complement the other.

If you do choose this approach I’d recommend using two separate domain names. That’s because when you create content on a subdomain most search engines treat it as a separate site, however if you add content to another folder on your site (yourwebsite.com/blog), the search engines treat it as part of your main site.

Hope that helps…