What is a blog? This is a blog post in the blog part of this site. Why is this page part of a blog? What makes this page part of the blog part of this site? Why is this page not just considered to be a page on this website?

A blog is like a website in that it is also an online place that people can visit, but a blog is usually a little different from a website that just displays information about a business, or that has a shop and maybe a shopping cart that you can use to order products online. However, a blog can also display some information about a business.

Getting a little confused yet?

Blog owners usually set up a blog for one of four main reasons:

1)
To keep a personal online journal – a place where the blogger’s family and friends can keep up to date with what is happening in the blogger’s life – by reading their blog posts in that blog and by viewing their photos in that blog.

2)
To provide information to people through articles or content that they (the blogger) write and add to their blog, and to earn money from their blog by monetizing their blog. When people speak of successful bloggers, they are speaking of those bloggers that tried to make money from monetizing their blogs, and that succeeded in doing so.

3)
A business may use a blog to advertise their business, instead of having a “traditional” or old fashioned html brochure website designed for this purpose. The business owner (or his or her staff) can easily add more pages of content to the blog, or can make changes and updates to it, since a blog is usually a CMS (Content Management System) site.

4)
The fourth reason people may choose to use a blog is because they want to easily manage adding products to a shopping cart themselves, and want to easily manage updating prices or making changes to the shopping cart or product information displayed.

While all blogs have some html, they are often powered differently to a website, making it easier for just about anybody to write and add their own content, or to make changes to their blog, themselves.

Sometimes a person may use just one blog for all of the reasons above.

What is a blog?
A blog is usually an online place where the blog owner (the blogger) tries to add new content as often as possible – on his or her own.

Two popular blogging platforms are Blogger and WordPress. Blogger and WordPress.com are free blogging platforms. Free Blogger blogs end in blogspot.com Free wordpress.com sites end in wordpress.com

Our favourite sort of blog or site is when we use a free WordPress theme that we choose from more than 1 500 free WordPress themes at wordpress.org. This site your are viewing right now has a free WordPress theme. We have further customized the theme ourselves, but only slightly.

Note the address of this site, http://tant.co.za – there is no .wordpress.com or .blogspot.com added to the end of our site’s address. That is how we like it, with nothing extra added at the end. If there was something extra added at the end of tant ( like .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com ) then this site wouldn’t really be our very own site – it would just be one of the many free sites on blogspot.com or wordpress.com

We like to register a domain ( like tant.co.za ), get hosting, install WordPress, select a free WordPress theme, do some settings, and get started adding pages of content to our very own site ourselves.

Many professionals use WordPress as a website, as a place to give the public information about their business. These professionals may add only pages to their site (like home, about, products, services, gallery, contact) and may never add blog posts to it.

You can usually tell when a person is using their WordPress Content Management System as only a professional business website by looking at the navigation tabs:

If the only navigation tabs you can see anywhere on the site (but usually near the top of the site) are only tabs like home, about, products (or services) and contact, then it is likely that the site owner is using their site, even if it is powered by WordPress or another Content Management System, as only a professional website.

If there are navigation tabs that say “blog” or “news” or something similar, then at least part of their site is being used as a blog (a place to add new pages of content).

If there is a navigation area that says something like “recent posts” then you know that the site is being used as a blog.

If there is a navigation area that says something like “recent comments” you know the site is being used as mostly a blog (and you will also know that the blog owner accepts comments on his or her blog posts – and has actually been receiving some comments!)

What is a blog?

A blog is just another site. Even call it a website if you want to. Perhaps the difference comes into it when somebody asks you what you enjoy doing online and you reply “I enjoy blogging” because you wouldn’t say “I enjoy websiting.” People use their blogs to often add new pages of content that they’ve written to their site. Blogging is writing, and a blogger (writer) adds their writing to their blog.

© Copyright Teresa Schultz 2014