What is the difference between a website and a blog?
I have often been called pedantic. This means that sometimes I can be overly concerned with the accuracy or precision of something. In this case, however, I think it’s okay to be a little pedantic because technically a blog is a website.
What is a website?
A British computer scientist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, invented the World Wide Web or Web for short in 1989. His vision was for an easy way to share information stored on networked computers in different geographic locations. Kind of like an interconnected web of information. As it turns out, any time you have a collection of one or more web pages that are hosted under the same domain, you have a website.
Purchasing domain names carefully is a very important aspect of owning a website. Having a website is an important part of running a business. Make sure you are the rightful registered owner of your domain name.
This doesn’t really say what a website can do but it does explain what it is. Websites can be developed for businesses, organisations, governments and individuals. They can be maintained and looked after by one person or a team of people, depending on the size and function of the website.
Websites can be small in size, i.e. have a limited number of pages or massive in scale like Google or Wikipedia. Usually the information on a website's pages are relatively static, meaning it doesn’t change all that often. On the other hand, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter are also websites and these change all the time!
What is a blog?
A blog is a website with regularly updated information. Much like a diary or journal. It’s usually written or published by an individual rather than a company or news organisation. This is not to say that a company won’t have a blog, rather a person or author at the company will be the responsible person for the contents of the blog.
The term blog is a portmanteau which happens when you combine two words to form a new one, in this case web + log = blog. The act of writing and publishing is called blogging. Unlike the more static pages on a website, blog pages are referred to as articles or posts and are published regularly. This can vary from multiple times a day to a few times a week or month. There is no rule, it depends on the author of the blog and the kind of information being presented. Tech Warrior’s learning hub (for information on building a website) is a blog and publishes posts a few times per week.
The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.
—Tim Berners-Lee
Blog comments
Another key difference between a website and a blog is community engagement. The author of a blog will often open the opportunity for discussion on what has been published. This discussion takes the form of a comment system situated below the main article or post.
In recent times, however, this has been abused by both people and automated scripts or bots. In the former, people can take the conversation off-topic which means irrelevant things are discussed, outside the focus of the original blog post. Additionally commenters can sometimes be vitriolic to other comment posters, focussing on the person and not what was said in a disrespectful or spiteful manner. In the latter, the scripts or bots endeavour to post comments, also unrelated, containing spam links to other dubious websites. This is done in an effort to try and con Google and other search engines into giving them a higher rank on the search results pages. This kind of behavior has resulted in many blogs limiting comments or putting safeguards in place.
A well-rounded website will contain both web pages and posts. In other words it will be both a website and a blog. Web pages are useful for static information that doesn’t change all that much or often. Publishing a blog can keep customers and visitors up to date with the latest news and happenings. It can also build deeper engagement and trust through the comment system, provided this is managed properly.