Web­sites, Blogs, and WordPress

Word­Press is an amaz­ing solu­tion whether you need to build a Web­site, a blog, or both. To get started we need to under­stand the dif­fer­ences between a Web­site and a Blog. (even though many use the terms interchangeably)

Web­site: In the early days of the Web, a Web­site con­sisted of sta­tic pages (one-way mes­sages) that were avail­able to view on the Web. These pages rarely changed their con­tent and were used for “Home” pages, “About Us” pages, etc… (There was no two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion available)

Blog: Blogs change a reg­u­lar Web page into a dynamic page that includes a com­ment­ing sys­tem so there is two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the author and his or her fol­low­ing. Typ­i­cally blogs usu­ally post new con­tent on a weekly or daily basis and are posted in reverse-chronological order. Search engines love blogs because it pro­vides fresh and new content.

Why you should have a Web­site with a Blog: Nowa­days, you should have both sta­tic pages and dynamic pages in a Web­site. This gives you the abil­ity to post infor­ma­tion and also get feed­back on your posts through blog­ging. The best way I have found to inte­grate both is using Word­Press. There are a lot of good plat­forms out there, but for the cost and scal­a­bil­ity, Word­Press is my favorite!

Clar­i­fy­ing the two dif­fer­ent types of WordPress…

Word­Press can be con­fus­ing because there are two dif­fer­ent ver­sions. My favorite is WordPress.org, but let me explain the differences.

WordPress.com: This is the scaled down free ver­sion. WordPress.com is hosted on their servers (in the cloud) and you are lim­ited to the themes you can use and you can’t use plu­g­ins. When you set up your account you will get a domain name like “www.mywebsite.wordpress.com”. This doesn’t look very pro­fes­sional, but it depends on why you are using the service.

WordPress.org: This ver­sion of Word­Press is free, but you host it on your own server. To do this you need to buy a host­ing plan that sup­ports Word­Press. It gives you the abil­ity to cre­ate a pro­fes­sional look­ing Web­site at a frac­tion of the cost. Here are some of the fea­tures you get:

• Choose and Add any Word­Press theme (not avail­able on WordPress.com)
• Add Plu­g­ins for e-Commerce, Slid­ers, Mem­ber­ship Sites, etc… (not avail­able on WordPress.com)
• You have total own­er­ship con­trol of your Web­site (not avail­able on WordPress.com)

Set­ting Up WordPress.org: You need to buy a host­ing plan for your WordPress.org Website/Blog.

• Pur­chase a host­ing pack­age (I rec­om­mend GoDaddy’s Word­Press Host­ing, but there are many great host­ing com­pa­nies out there)
• Install WordPress.org on your hosted account. (GoDaddy has the eas­i­est setup in my opin­ion. They already have the most cur­rent ver­sion of WordPress.org. You just click the but­ton to let them know you want it installed. It takes about 30 min­utes and then your WordPress.org soft­ware is installed. Other host­ing ser­vices make you down­load and install it your­self.)
• Now you’re ready to install a theme if you don’t use the default theme.

Host your Word­Press Blog at GoDaddy.com

Note: I am an affil­i­ate for GoDaddy and make a com­mis­sion if you pur­chase your host­ing through them. I per­son­ally use GoDaddy for my own host­ing and love their ser­vice. See my full dis­claimer below.