The Vanishing Difference Between Blog and Web Site
Some time ago I started switching all of my company’s (Energion Publications) web sites to use WordPress as a content management system. As I began to do that I intended to make those sites look as little like a blog as possible. The basic idea was that a blog is a sort of personal site, less formal, and certainly not adequate for a business site. Businesses could have blogs, but their sites weren’t blogs.
But then I found that I wanted to have links to the latest news from the company blog on the main company site. Then I wanted some summaries of certain posts so people could see the latest company news on the company’s home page. I ended up with a site that is actually very much like a blog.
The front page of the blog lists the latest news articles (blog posts) in reverse calendar order. The sidebar provides an excellent place to feature items, and at the same time I can use WordPress custom page types to create an array of catalog pages, which currently include book lists, individual book detail pages, author lists, and individual author information pages.
Instead of having two sites, one traditional, and one a blog (which I had on a subdomain), I now have the entire site built into one blog site, and I have the normal page of posts that one finds on the front page of a blog.
One additional feature that helps me do this with WordPress is the menu feature, so that I can place the large number of links I need on the web site (various company sites, individual book promotion sites, and so forth) without making it too confusing. And yes, the theme is built quite closely on the TwentyTen theme that comes with WordPress 3.0+. I had started to work up a unique theme when I realized I was making something close enough to that in any case.
It’s time to get over the blog prejudice. People want rapidly updated content, and combining a good CMS with a regularly updated blog will help you meet that desire.
Related articles
- The Strength Of WordPress – Not Merely A Blog Software (webmanmarketing.com)
- Why Web Sites Need Blogs (brighthub.com)
