The Clean and Green Club

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Should You Use a Blog to Host Your Non-Blog Website?

Blogs have several advantages over traditional websites. To name a few:

• They get into the search engines almost instantly (I once did a Google search for something I’d blogged about ten minutes earlier, and my blog post was there, on the first page of the results)
• It’s easy to increase the reach of a blog by feeding it to your social networking profiles
• You can set your blog to automatically ping Technorati and other blog content aggragators, as well as pretty much all of the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn, Plaxo, and I believe MySpace) so people will find you quickly if you blog about something topical and hot
• Blogs are incredibly easy to update; you don’t need to wait around for your webmaster to post content, just hit the “Publish” button
• Most blogs include a comment feature, which can create interactive discussion and a much greagter profile for your blog (unfortunately, the spammers figured this one out–so you always have to moderate the comments, approving the relevant ones and ditching the junk–plug-ins such as Akismet make this much easier, though they’re far from foolproof)

With all these advantages, why not use a blog to put up an ordinary non-blog website? WordPress, my favorite of the blog platforms, is available for free, updated regularly, and supported by a plethora of third-party add-ons. And you can host your WordPress site on your own domain, which I stongly recommend.

For the last several sites I’ve put up, I’ve had my webmaster install WordPress on my domain’s server (from what I understand, a matter of only a couple of clicks anyway), select and customize one of the myriad “themes” (templates) available, and then, depending on the site, either I put up content or she does. Here are some examples of sites we’ve done in WordPress:

• https://www.principledprofit.com
• https://www.business-ethics-pledge.org
• https://ddinafriedman.com
• https://painlessgreenbook.com

In short, the WordPress blogging platform offers a great deal of flexibility in design, ease of use, interactivity, and good search engine “juice,” and is appropriate for lots of websites, not just blogs. Something to think about as you put up more sites (I think I have 14 right now).