The (traditional) difference between Blogs & Websites

The Website

Every business needs a website. They nearly all have one. They use the site to explain their product or service, display them in the appropriate fashion and market them to grow the business and convey the brand image and representation of the company in line with the physical business.

The site is usually contracted and developed by designers and coders and may or may not have a content management system to manage the information on the site although even today their are still sites that are completely static and do not update or maintain their information with Content Management.

That’s a website, plain and simple.

The Blog with WordPress (the free CMS)

Firstly lets explain something here.  WordPress is not only a free cms for blogs.  The perception is generally that blogs are a site which allow people to keep an on line diary of their experiences, but this perception is somewhat dated now. In reality, the flexible nature of the WordPress CMS and the Search Engine friendliness of the software has ment that businesses have begun to utilise its features in conjunction with their current websites or even as stand alone sites in themselves, meaning that they are not only blogs in the traditional sense, but also complete websites in form and function.

This goes some way to showing just how flexible a WordPress CMS is.

A full list of WordPress features are listed on the Official WordPress site.

As a business you should look at this extensive list of features and compare them to the description of the website above.  A website will not necessarily come with all these features included.  You will have to detail your requirements to a web designer who will then see to implementing and actioning all your requirements.  Then you will be considering the marketing and applications options for your site. Why should you when this free cms covers a vast range of these options already and is Search Engine Friendly from scratch!

But lets clarify something here.  While the CMS itself may be free, nothing in this world is for nothing. Someone with the right knowledge and experience needs to set up the site, edit the design and implement all the correct plugins and settings to get the software to where it really needs to be and that, I’m afraid, means putting your hand in your pocket and shelling out some cold hard cash.

The benefit though, is most certainly in the long term as the wordpress cms is open source, hence new plugins and additions to the site are constantly being added and developed allowing you the freedom to extend and expand your site as required, and with a little training, you can even manage to do all this yourself.

WordPress CMS site examples.

Check out just a few example sites being run on the wordpress platform:

Ford Autoshows
Harrington Estates
Collegian
Maryland Commercial Real Estate Investors
Kauai Rentals
IES Solutions
Z World

Other FREE CMS Options:

And Finally, just so you know, for a whole range of Free CMS options available check out this post by Paul Anthony from Web Distortion Ireland.