Choosing Behind Blog Or Website

What’s best for your online business presence a blog or a website?

What about newer platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, Pintrest, Squidoo…how should I use these in my online business?

Of all the confusion people have when launching or re-launching their internet businesses, how they design their site.

After all, your web site requires static pages like your sales page, contact page, squeeze or opt-in list building page, etc…AND you can see the benefit of having a high-traffic blog where you can post daily or weekly updates and allow your readers to interact with you.

These are critical business decisions for sure…just to show you how critical, our #1 source of traffic, sales and PROFITS for the last two years in a row across all of our businesses has been our blog.

That’s how powerful getting your site design decision right can become.

CLEARING UP THE CONFUSION BETWEEN BLOGS, WEBSITES AND SOCIAL NETWORK PLATFORMS

I’ve helped many businesses improve their online results, ranging from more traditional corporate companies through SMB and many indiividual entrepreneurs…in every case there is a benefit of having both static content and a more active/personalized web blog section of the site.

There is a good deal of confusion that exists in the marketplace around blogs, regular html web pages/sites and social networking pages like Tumblr.   Traditionally HTML web pages were used for static content, forum software (vBulletin, etc…) was used for forums and then web blogging platforms like TypePad, WordPress and Blogger were used for web blogging.

Since the onset of web blogging though the underlying blog software has evolved incredibly into full-scale content management and design platforms that are capable of hosting static as well as web blogging pages making the differences between traditiional web pages and blog pages impossible to detect from a visual perspective.

Now we reach a time when you have HTML development platforms, Blog development platforms and Social networking platforms (Tumbler, Facebook, Squidoo, etc…)

So you can pretty much get the same look and feel across any platform – HTML, web blog or social networking platform, the difference is what has each platform got to offer you and what are the potential downsides.

The main differences are:

1. HTML is a more open standard and though there may be more complexity, you have more flexibility in functions…though it is more specialized which means more custom work or training is required the more complex you get

2. Blogging platform like WordPress or TypePad – offer 3 major advantages

a) They have simplified the development of pages and sites into “widgets” as design modules and “plugins” as combined design/functional modules making the need to know HTML less necessary

b) Blogs offer RSS (Simple Syndication) which provides a standardized way to share your content automatically after each update and

c) Blogs developed on the WordPress or TypePad platforms are backed by an entire open-source community contributing templates, widgets and plugins that you can tap into to get almost any functionality or design element imaginable.

People have mentioned that blogs are easier to maintain…that’s not quite accurate.  With blogs your original templates, widgets and plugins have all been designed around a certain release of the underlying blog platform (WP version number as an example).  However WP is constantly changing and soon you may find conflicts that make your site unusable…so you either need to go with an overall blog management theme where the theme owner offers (for  a price) to keep their design elements up to date (EX Thesis) OR you are on your own and have to hire help or figure it out yourself.

3. Integrated Social Networking Platforms (Tumblr, Facebook, Squidoo, etc…) Over time there have been another range of platforms that have become available that host their sites in the cloud and allow you to create your own pages.   The challenge with these is that you rely on their business to continue hosting your content (I’ve never been comfortable with this for my main content), the advantage being tighter tie in’s with social sharing, commenting, etc…(this is definitely a good thing)

All in all…my advice would be:

1. You do want to have a mix of static and web log content on your site.  You can do this by combining html pages with WordPress OR you can do it all with WP, really up to you in terms of pro’s/con’s of each platform

2. Branch out and create social networking pages that augment your business and drive traffic back to your site, but don’t exclusively host on these sites as you are 100% exposed to their terms of service and viability…either of which could disappear tomorrow.

YOUR FEEDBACK…

What’s your take on blog versus html webpages?  Do you have a site today or are you launching one soon, which platform will you choose and why?  Share it with a comment.