What is a blog and how is it different from a website?

One sunny day, I travel around the forums and Facebook to spend my free time. I see a lot of questions of beginners asking about the differences from a blog and a website?

And, maybe you are one of the people who are also finding the answers: What is a blog? And, how is it different from a blog and a website?

If you still have hesitated to start creating a blog or website, the guides of this article will tell you the details.

With my long time experience in the blog and website development, your questions will be answered to support you to know more the fundamentals to step into the internet games, which is interesting but also get a lot of competitors.

What is a blog?

For common knowledge, a blog is considered a personal website. Some people can say it is a web-log that is an online diary. In any way, a blog is a form of a website.

But, when you come to some online sites, you can find the blogs’ contents are often updated with the latest posts at the top. So, the readers usually see the new things happen to them. That is one of the vital ways bloggers attract readers, so they need to work and write good content to upload more often or update the old posts to catch up with the correct information.

Although writing a blog is one of the interesting works, it is not easy to get success if the owers are lazy. It is because of the information that has just uploaded to the webs, it can become old after a few hours with the sharp changes of modern life. Thus, a good blog often renews and updates writing suitably.

The author of a blog is usually a person or small group with the same style of writing, living, and thinking. Most of the posts on its focus on sharing experiences, skills, and sometimes news.

Thus, if you want to share your hobby online, a blog is suitable for the beginning. And, with a blog, you can contact with your readers from the comments at the end of each post.

>>> You may want to read how to stop comment spam for your website.

The development of the blog platform

In the 1990s of the twenty century, some people created personal websites writing about their thoughts and ideas. With the limit of the technique, most of them had been developed with HTML and CSS, which is good for running but not flexible.

It can be considered as the first blog in the world created in 1993 with its domain of links.net; until now it has still a very old looking of design.

Although some platforms came to the internet, the first public blog could be reconsigned, which is www.livejournal.com which was created in 1999. This site is a place where plenty of people can publish their blogs. It has worked in that domain.

But, the term “weblog” was created in 1997; until 1999, to call it shorter, “blog” was used instead of “weblog”.

Then, the establishment of the blogger.com of Google in 2003 has known as the big step to the new way of blogging. Many features have started adding to the users, but they were limited for many features such as theme looking…

At the same year of 2003, another platform of WordPress.com was opened, though its first parts created in 2000. Then, the open-source platform of WordPress.org was published to the public to create a trend of creating a blog as well as a website.

And, the blogger.com of Google and WordPress platform has changed the ways of the development of blogs. Two fundamentals have good working nowadays; however, a lot of features have been changed to catch up with the needs of users and jumps of information technology (IT).

After all, the future of the blog may have more changes and development, because of the social networks like instagram.com, facebook.com. quora.com… that have increased strongly, making the habits of most people who use the internet as one part of their life.

Until now, over 35% of blogs and websites use the WordPress platform to create their 455,000,000 sites. And around 20% of this number run blogs and websites on their own web hosting or private servers, which is WordPress.org. And, I am one of them although I worked around with many other content management systems (CMS), and stop at WordPress.org platform.

Differences from a blog and website

The basic look is similar between a blog and a website. If you think and say both of them are the same, that is all right.

However, if we go deeper to analyze them, we can find out some differences as below.

For websites:

• The content is less changed,
• Supply the content to readers and customers more than to discuss,
• Created for organizing business or commerce purposes, promoting products or services,
• Create an official portfolio,
• Have own rules, conditions, and privacy,
• Maybe have a section for bogging, but not all of the websites.

For blogs:

• The content is often changed,
• Range the posts following date,
• Usually, used for reference,
• The posts are published to share own hobbies, thoughts, ideas, which can invite the readers to discuss,
• The blogs’ content often carries the features of news.

In general, almost websites aim to the target used for business. They are organized to sell products, services to clients. Therefore, their pages have contents with the ideas and intentions of the owners or organizations. On the other hand, supplying content is the king on blogs, and the content can be used for discussion.

The blog is better than the website?

As mentioned above, depending on the purposes of the owners, blogs can be useful in some circumstances, but websites can have strengths in some fields.

If you want to create a site for hobbies, and entertainment purposes, to write content for making money online in the future, the blog style is great.

If you want to sell a product such as shoes, clothes…, or to introduce yourself or companies, a website style should be set up.

And, If you want to lead the readers to increase customers for your business, starting a website with a blog section is a good idea.

Although when you want to create a blog or website, you need to pay attention to three important things.

1. Select a good suitable platform to start your blog or business website. I like to choose WordPress, which is fast and easy to manage and develop. And, I have used WP for this blog, and other blogs and websites.
2. Choose a nice domain name and good hosting to save your site. For many years of working in the internet sector, I often buy domains at Namecheap and hosting at Sectorlink. These are my favorite suppliers although others are also good, just my own opinions.
3. Insert a nice theme for your blog interface, and choose suitable plugins to optimize the contents of sites to rank higher on Google. You can buy nice themes at themeforest.net or eleganttheme.com.

Now is your turn to start your spiritual products. And, tell me any questions when you want to know more. When will you start a site?