Why WordPress blogs are better than normal web sites.
August 26, 2006
A WordPress blog is far superior to the average web site in many ways, especially if you're not an HTML or graphics guru. Here are the top 3 reasons why you should be building blogs instead of more traditional web sites:
1. WordPress blogs require no HTML skill, yet look great.
I personally use the Semiologic WordPress theme, which I love (I did an extensive review of Semiologic here, in case you're interested). It comes with some great skins and options to make a very clean, smooth looking blog with no HTML or web design knowledge.
This is more important than you might realize. People initially judge the quality of your content by the look of your site, even before they ever read a word. If the site doesn't have a professional look, they will assume you are not giving professional advice.
Plus one for WordPress blogs!
2. WordPress blogs include RSS feeds that automatically get included in dozens of RSS feed directories.
WordPress has built-in RSS feed functions so that each time you post to the blog dozens of RSS feed sites get notified (pinged) about your new content. These feed sites are frequented by tens of thousands of webmasters looking for good content for their sites. If they decide to use your RSS feed, you get free traffic from their sites.
Semiologic is even better, since it only pings when a new post is created, whereas WordPress will ping even when you are just editing a post (which can be seen as ping spam).
Plus two for WordPress blogs!
3. You can keep posting to your blog even when you're not in front of the computer!
No, I'm not losing my mind in my old age. You do not have to be in front of your keyboard to have your posts automatically sent to the blog. In fact, the post you're reading right now was posted when I wasn't in front of the keyboard.
I knew I would be going out of town this weekend and probably wouldn't be able to get online to post, so I post-dated a blog entry that I wrote a few days ahead of time. I just changed the Post Timestamp to two days later.
Once the post date actually came (two days later), only then did the post become visible on the home page. Voila, regular content even when I'm not around.
This is great, because creativity usually comes in bursts. So when you're really feeling creative and you're cranking out the articles, they don't all have to be posted that day. You can post date each subsequent entry a day or two later and have it automatically get posted then.
Plus three for WordPress blogs!
Summing it all Up
There are a lot of other reasons I prefer WordPress blogs over traditional web sites, but these are the three big ones: they are much easier to create, they have built in sources of getting traffic with RSS feeds, and you can post-date articles so they appear when you're not around.
All of those things can be accomplished with a normal web site, but to make them behave that way you would have to have a lot of extra software created and installed. And you know what you would have after installing all of that extra software? That's right: a WordPress blog.
P.S. I recommend that you read my full review of the Semiologic Pro WordPress Theme and see if it's not a fantastic tool for building your next web site.
Comments
30 Responses to “Why WordPress blogs are better than normal web sites.”
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. He is the creator of a suite of popular software tools, including: Jonathan L Leger 
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This is one of the nicest looking blogs around. It's neat and the "offerings" on the site are very much evident. It's not cluttered.
On the subject of Adsense, the topics covered are wide ranging and indepth; a real help.
Nice, I was told that wordpress can't use adsense.That was my main reason to use blogger.
I see it on your page here.I will try it.
Yea, semilogic pro comes with ad spaces which makes it extreemly easy to place adsense on a page.
Actually, Word Press has a plugin available that makes including AdSense as simple as adding a tag. There are many other plugins available to simplify many other tasks, such as adding Amazon products to your page.
Hello Jonathan,
Very good article.
After coding traditional html static pages for about 10 years I have had my eyes opened wide with the possibilities of Blogging and in particular the WordPress blog and the benefits of using it. So much so that I jumped head first into Semiologic Pro to cut my teeth on WordPress.
Its been a fun and exciting learning process. But I have a lingering question and this question is how to best use WordPress to get the maximum advantage out of it.
So the question is "Do I use Posts or Pages?" to get the most benefit out of the program?
Every Post or blog send a Ping to the Blog Search Engines where from there the Search Engines are searched and or RSS feeds are used. These feeds and Search Engine information is then picked up by the major Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo the way I understand it. Hence you are pushing your post to the online world pretty quickly as opposed to waiting for the Search Engine to find you.
Using static Pages on WordPress has to be similar to creating static pages with editors like Dreamweaver, Frontpage etc in that you create the page, optimize it and link to the page and then wait for Google to spider and index the page.
So why would I want to use [b]WP Pages [/b]instead of [b]WP Posts[/b]?
Why wouldn't I want to create the page using Posts, unselecting the Comments box, removing the date of the Posts etc to make it look like a typical static Page but yet getting all the other benefits of a blog Post?
That is my question and I ask it because I am not sure if I am missing something here. There might be other excellent valid reasons for doing those old regular boring static pages……that I am overlooking totally.
Please share your thoughts with me…..I am curious to get some feedback on this. Thanks.
Charlie
P.S. Kseniga, Semiologic Pro makes it extremely easy to add AdSense to your WP blog. I love it especially for that and have used it on 2-3 of my pages.
What about existing content in Blogger blogs? I have one hosted by Blogger and 3 that reside on my server, but are still Blogger? Can I retain the dates of exisiting posts?
I'm linking this comment to InternetExplorerBlog.Com, one of many WordPress blogs I've set up. You can definitely add Adsense by pasting in the code to the index page, archive page, single post page, or even the main CSS (styles) sheet page, all of which are editable.
If you modify the CSS page, keep a free, good copy on your home computer. It's important to edit it separately and then cut and paste the whole code because, for some reason, if you view it in a different browser window and go back to edit the CSS file some more, part of the code disappears from the scroll Window and then your whole blog is messed up. Really, this only happens if you do additional edits to customize a theme (change colors, add your own graphics, etc.).
Honestly Blogs are better for generating traffic because of the imbedded RSS code and ease for adding brief and frequent content which keeps the blog fresh, but if you're comfortable with a little coding, it's extremely easy to set up. WordPress is free and offers step by step instruction: http://wordpress.org/ The main thing is to have a host that can accommodate PHP files and provides MySql databases. I do web development and have been toying with the idea of setting up blogs for people as one of my services, but frankly, there's nothing wrong with useing Blogger or other Internet sites that offer free blogging. It achieves the same thing. Many hosts have also added blogging software to make it easier. I use 1&1, but separately installed my own WordPress before they added that feature. GoDaddy likely has blogging now or will soon to stay competitive.
There are also a bunch of plugins for free on the WordPress site and others. You set up tags automatically and the key is to name your articles in the blogs with good keywords.
Semiologic seems to offer a lot for $275, but on closer inspection, many of its features can be added with a little Internet research for free. I don't mean to cut anyone's commission potential, but there's something funky about someone making money from a set of programs (WordPress) which is open source and intended to be free, easy and accessible to everyone. I'm not saying Semiologic doesn't offer anything, but you may want to give WordPress, Blogger or another free blogging service a try first. At least then you get familiar with how it all works so you can maximize any future investment.
But take my advice here with some skepticism. I've yet to make money with Adsense. If John's doing as well as it seems, his advice is golden. Certainly, I've found many of John's newsletter emails and articles very helpful in my attempts to get an Adsense account and start incorporating them into my web sites and blogs. I'm just not getting any clicks. Instead, I make my money from web design and development and through my voice overs: www.NikkiSaco.Com ( forgive my shameless self-promotion). I'd love to make money from Adsense. I'll keep trying until I get it right. I certainly hope everyone else the best of luck with this.
I also noticed that Wordpress sites get spidered quicker in Google. In my case, my site found its way into Google's blog search within 2-3 days.
Fantastic Article Jonathan look forward to more!
Regards
Myles
Well, speaking of blogger, which one would you guys prefer; Blogger.com or WordPress? Some reckon that Blogger.com works better SEO-wise. Jonathan/others, discussion would be appreciated since this is an area i've long wanted to hear educated opinion on.
Arman
Have always had WordPress pre-installed in cPanel but up til now, have never thought about setting it up. The reason I never used it was because I thought that *aparently* static urls were no better for seo than dynamic urls because the content still needs to be pulled from a database. It seems I thought wrong.
Hi Ksenija,
As long as I know it is true that adsense are not allowed in a free Wordpress blogs. But if you are hosting your own Wordpress blogs than it is allowed. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Best Regard,
Leon
John does WordPress automatically includes the Syndicate links that are visible on your blog?
Ksenija, there is a WordPress plugin called AdSense Deluxe that I use to include AdSense on my WordPress sites. Of course, you could manually hand-code the AdSense into the templates, but AdSense Deluxe not only makes it really easy to display AdSense, but most importantly it makes it so quick and easy to change the ad format. Which of course makes it easy to experiment with different ad formats, color combinations, etc to see which work best for you site.
I hope that helps!
Although I've already got several blogs already set up with Blogger - I'm seriously considering this option for my next blog - or even my next site! Your in depth review is really useful, thanks.
In response to Charlie:
Creating static pages is a great idea for static information that should always be accessible from the home page of your site (i.e. contact info, 'about' info, newsletter info, etc). You always want people to have direct access to that.
For search engines, though, a page and a post are the same thing. So optimizing a page versus a post doesn't yield any additional results.
Page and Post are just terms used in a blog to differentiate static material and dated material.
In response to Jen:
WordPress has a Blogger import function so you can import all of your Blogger posts into a WordPress blog. It requires that your server have PHP CURL support, so check for that first.
In response to Nikki:
Yes most of the plugins installed by Semiologic are available for free, but then you would have to 1) find them 2) make sure they are compatible with your installation 3) install them and 4) hope nothing breaks.
You're a web designer Nikki, so for you that's no big deal, but for most people those 4 steps can be a real challenge, and that's why Semiologic is so great: it is a one-stop package of everything the average webmaster needs to run a successful, interactive blog/site.
In response to Arman:
Blogger is good, it just doesn't give you as many features and plugins as are available with WordPress/Semiologic.
But Blogger is certainly a solid alternative if you don't have the funds for your own site or the know-how to install WordPress.
If you run a wordpress site, then you might want to learn how to add videos via Google Video and YouTube and others, I just explained that on my main blog - look for the topic "How The Hell Did I Get Word Google Video into my Word Press?"…
And… you can see def that I use adsense there and it is working like a charm!
Ok here is the direct link to find the word press plug in that enables you to add videos to your wordpress website:
http://www.semmy.name/index.php/258/how-the-hell-did-i-get-google-video-into-word-press/
Another helpful free word press plugin to AUTO TRANSLATE YOUR blog:
http://www.semmy.name/index.php/280/make-your-website-multilingual/
[…] Why WordPress Blogs Are Better Than Ordinary Websites Johnathan Leger likes Word Press blogs for these reasons… I agree. No matter what the site, I think it's best to use a WordPress template because it can be adapted to fit the purposes of a static website combined with the benefits of a blog! […]
I run a small handful of sites and only one of them is really the type that needs to be in blog format. The others get by perfectly fine without being blogs or being run by WordPress in any way. I'm almost ashamed to say I have even one blog because "blogs" are so darn cheap. They are a dime a dozen, litter cyberspace, tend to be link farms and overrun with Google ads. "Hey, everyone! Click on my Google ads! If you click on my Google ads I'll make lots of money! And if you want to make lots of money like I am then start a blog, any blog, and put Google ads on it!! Then you never have to work again!!!" Gee whiz, people, get over it. The one blog I have (no, I won't promote it here) is on Google's blog service but I don't even put their clunky looking ads onto it.
This product looks almost too good to be true. I'm going to read up on it and hope to have it up and running on my site by next week.
Thanks for the article and the information. I really appreciate it.
I'm up for any other suggestions anyone else may have that will help my site out. Please let me know.
Thanks,
[…] Johnathan Leger likes Word Press blogs for these reasons… I agree. No matter what the site, I think it’s best to use a WordPress template because it can be adapted to fit the purposes of a static website combined with the benefits of a blog! […]
Jonathan, I can see the value from what you write in using WP instead of a regular website. But I have some questions and I think it's because I'm not clear on the differences between a blog and a static website.
Would I still want to use SEO Elite to get reciprocal links? How about directory submissions? Would I only submit my blog to blog directories, or to the website directory sites too? That's a start.
Thanks for any guidance you can offer.
Why Blogs May Be Better Than Regular Websites
After reading Glenn Ross’s post about quieting negative word-of-mouth with your blog, I’m beginning to think that companies without blogs are either hiding in a cave and have no idea how powerful blogs are or they simply don’t want to…
I have to say I partially agree with Christians comment of September 8th last year about the cheapness of blogs and the way they litter cyberspace etc.
On the other hand both Christian and I are both here right?
We both clicked to get here and no one put a gun to our head so I guess his post is a little simplistic.
After all we won't run out of webspace anytime soon and blogs are like all media ie good and bad at the same time. Just like you can change your TV channel or choose not to switch it on in the first place , you can also choose to be blogless.
My opinion has changed and I see their value regardless of their lack of sex appeal.
keep up the good work Jonathon.
I've just been letting everything happen without me lately. I've just been hanging out not getting anything done, but eh. Maybe tomorrow. I just don't have anything to say. I've pretty much been doing nothing worth mentioning. Nothing seems important