Websites are dead long live the blog!

Gone are the days when blogs were just for geeks and places for people to rant about a topic or their life in general.

Nowadays it has become harder to tell if you are looking at a regular website built with HTML or a WordPress blog.  Blogs now look and feel like a regular website.

There are two main types of blogs:

Hosted Blogs - you, (or your webmaster), install blogging software like WordPress on a web hosting account.

Free Online Blogs - services like Blogger and BlogSpot offer the option of opening an online blogging account on their servers.

Hosted blogs actually have many advantages over traditional websites, here are a few of them:

• Much less expensive to set up than a traditional website
• Quicker to get up and running
• Users can maintain the blog without any technical knowledge (and without Web Designer costs)
• The search engines love blogs making your marketing efforts easier
• There are plenty of professionally design templates to make your blog stand out
• Adding regular content is a breeze and you can even schedule updates to occur on a regular basis

Ok, so traditional HTML based websites aren’t exactly dead, (in fact I still use them for my eCommerce sites that have thousands of products), but for the average small business that wants a web presence, a blog is certainly the way to go.