OK, you’ve decided to have your own personal website for your holiday home. (If you haven’t decided, read this post on why I think you should). Now you have another decision to make: Is it better to create a standard Website or use a Blog?
First, a little bit of history.
In the beginning was HTML, and while it was ugly, it was good. It allowed anyone with a modicum of skill to create Web sites, producing both good content as well as attractive presentation of that content. You could even weave pages together into a comprehensive site but the problem was that it was tedious work, and to this day, still is.
Then more and more sophisticated tools appeared on the scene, starting with FrontPage and evolving into the powerful Dreamweaver and GoLive – expensive commercial solutions for managing Web content, allowing you to create beautiful sites with compelling content. But they don’t allow you and me, us non-techie people, to maintain or add content. So most Web sites are static creations, and most business, rightly, view their Web sites as a sort of digital brochure. Sure, it might be sophisticated but it’s very rare for a traditional Web site to be updated more frequently than once every month or two. (How many people have you heard saying they don’t update the Web site because they have to send requests to a Webmaster, who queues it for weeks before actually making the change?)
Meanwhile, blogging started to develop from Web-based Web page editors providing tools for letting non-tech users add new content to their Web pages. Logically, this technique was first used as online diaries and journals, and, quickly, Weblogs caught on and grew quickly.
As they became more popular, blogging tools evolved at breakneck speeds, and now we have the current generation of Weblog tools; they are powerful and capable tools for managing even the largest and most complex Web sites. Further, because they’re quite flexible, sites that use blogging tools as their back end can greatly simplify management of a more traditional Web site.
Behind the Scenes
Where blogging really shines is when you look behind the scenes at how blogging tools actually work. In a way that’s far more sophisticated than Web page development tools, and far simpler, blogs let you separate the content from the presentation; if you really need to focus on presentation, you can edit some template files, but if you’re more interested in maintaining or adding more compelling content, you can focus on that easily. Even if you aren’t a devotee of blogging and believe it’s a fad (but, I tell you, it’s not), I strongly recommend you to learn more about blogs as a way to reinvent your Web site and make maintenance, updates, and adding new content far, far easier and within your own control.
My take on this is that the difference between blogs and web sites has, for us property owners, disappeared.
Blogging is far more versatile and miuch more sophisticated than it used to be. You can embed video, audio or photo galleries in your posts with the click of a mouse button, use the blog as a base for a podcast, integrate widgets or interactive tools, and have as many separate static pages as you want (just like a website) for things like Prices, Guest Reviews, and so on. And you can update them easily, as often as you like. You can also dedicate part of the website to Blogging – great for SEO as Google eats up steadily changing content.
You can also take control. Most of us can’t write and don’t want to write code, and so have relied on programmers to do it for us. In the fast and often changing content needs of rental owners that’s a problem. Repeated changes are expensive and can take time, whereas almost any owner can update a blog as often and as quickly as wanted.
Many of todays Themes (generic website designs sitting on top of WordPress platforms) also have excellent SEO built-in, and if they don’t, simply download and activate a plug-in called All-In-One-SEO which optimises your content by taking you through a sequence of actions every time you update content.
wordpress.org and wordpress.com are here.
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Most visitors to websites probably won’t have a clue as to whether they’re looking at something that’s been pieced together with blogging software or not. And frankly, I suppose why should they care. From an owner’s point of view, it perhaps comes down to what they want to achieve from their site, whether they want to run it themselves and what their technical ability is. In our case, we choose to run our own site and we use a combination of standard HTML pages (for the main site) and Wordpress (blogging software) specifically for our own blog, and that seems to serve us well enough.
You’re exactly right. Visitors don’t care about how the ‘site’ was made.
But using WP software gives owners the chance to take control of their site, without HTML and coding knowledge (and saving money and time in the process)
Hiya, did a google search and found this. thanks for the good info
Hello,this is Maida Summerton,just observed your Blog on google and i must say this blog is great.may I quote some of the article found in the post to my local students?i am not sure and what you think?anyhow,Thank you!
Maida, thanks, of course you can quote me. Many thanks.