Website or Blog?

Someone asked me the other day if she needed a blog since she already had a website. It struck me as we chatted that there are probably many people who are not clear about the differences between a website and a blog and what some of the advantages of having a blog are, over and above the benefit of having a website. My friend is a writer but the advice I gave her is also useful and relevant for solo professionals and small businesses so I thought I’d share them with you here:

A website

• A typical brochure-style website gives you several pages with your brochure information on it. This can serve you very well as it gives you clients/ readers/ customers all the factual information they need to know about you and your business/ books/ services

• A website like that is pretty much static. Once people have been once and read whatever is there to read, they don’t really need to come again unless they need to be reminded about something eg your office address when they are coming to visit you

• It can do well with search engines provided your designer has included search engine optimisation within the design

• You can update the website yourself fairly easily once your web designer has shown you a bit of HTML. This can be useful for a “Latest News” page. But you usually have to delete the old text to make room for the new text unless you’ve got the capability to add additional news items and additional pages.

• A website is not interactive - you are stating your message to your audience and they can’t interact in any way although people can usually email you via the Contact page.

A blog

• A blog alongside your website enables you to update content easily - as easily as writing an email using a web-based email account.

• You never lose the old content from a previous “post”. This is particulary useful if your latest “latest news” item is a follow up item to your previous “latest news” items. eg. Last month your news was “I’ll be appearing at the Hay Literary Festival…”; this month you can write “When I appeared at the Hay Literary Festival, we had a lively discussion about the publishing industry…”

• You can archive your posts according to date or subject eg “Book Events”, “Current Novel”, “Publishing Industry” and eventually build up a body of work

• Search engines LOVE regularly updated pages. They are likely to throw you up near the top more often and you’ll start appearing all over the internet as you write more and more. Your posts that are never deleted from months ago will be found by someone searching on a particular topic and that will introduce them to the rest of your blog. For example, my post on Malt Loaf on my arts blog Fusion View keeps getting picked up by a range of people from France across to South America even though I wrote it around a year ago - and hopefully, that means more and more people are discovering my blog through atypical searches (ie not by a typical searching like “Malaysian/ UK writer”, for example)

• And that is exactly the reason I started blogging as a writer. Almost two years ago, my presence was disappearing off the internet - my books website itself was just not enough to keep me active and live on the web. Traffic to my site was pitiful. Since I started blogging, I’m all over the web and my arts blog Fusion View has over 8,000 unique visitors a month.

• A blog is interactive and you can easily engage with your readers/ customers, building up loyalty and trust

• You can add multi media such as pictures, audio podcasts and videos very easily

• A blog has what is called an RSS feed that sends out notifications (like radio signals) to the rest of the web whenever it is updated so you don’t have to sit and wait for people to come and find you, it automatically tells people about your latest update.

• For solo professionals and small businesses, it may take time to blog but after the initial set up costs and some training, it’s a very cost-effective way to promote your presence online - which is very important if you have a limited budget.

Both

If you don’t already have a website, discuss with your web designer using the blog platform - you can create numerous static pages for the brochure part using the same blogging software: you don’t need to pay for a website plus a blog. Traditionally, some web designers charged you by the number of pages because the old technology meant that they had to hand code and link each new page. If you incorporate your website as part of your blog, once the blog is designed you don’t have to pay extra for the number of additional pages - that’s all part of the package.

My books website www.yangmayooi.co.uk is actually part of the Fusion View blogging platform - when you arrive at www.yangmayooi.co.uk, you’ll see the URL is in fact www.fusionview.co.uk/yang-may-ooi/. The brochure pages - click at the top of this page on the various links to Who We Are and What We Do etc - are all part of the pages facility in this blogging platform for ZenGuide, included at no extra cost.

And finally…

Yes, it’s true that I’m a blog evangelist, especially for smaller enterprises. It’s such a great way to make a big impact on limited resources that in my mind, you’re really missing a trick if you don’t take advantage of this great interactive web tool!

Photo: thanks to serc.carlton.edu