What’s the difference between a blog and a website?

Dave Taylor asks What’s the difference between a blog and a Web site?

Dave points out the interactive component and RSS feeds of blogs as as big advantages. He goes on to focus on how easy blogs are to manage as your key tool in website development – that is blogs run the websites of some pretty sophisticated developers.

Where blogging really shines is when you look behind the scenes at how blogging tools actually work. In a way that’s far more sophisticated than Web page development tools, blogs really let you separate the content from the presentation; if you want to focus on presentation, you can edit template [design] files, but if you’re just interested in maintaining existing content or adding new content, you can focus on that, too.

Creating a new Web page is a breeze with a blogging tool as the back end. Notice here that it’s really no more difficult than composing a new email message in a Web-based mail system such as Hotmail or Gmail.

In my opinion, this separation of content from presentation is a wonderful reason to consider using a blog as the foundation of your entire Web site. Being able to focus on the words–on what you want to say, on your content–is not only a wonderful relief (no worrying about breaking HTML with an edit hiccup!) but lowers the barrier of entry for new Web site creators/bloggers to almost zero. If you can write an email message, you can bookmark a Weblog entry page, create content, and manage a Web site. Just add water!

And like folks are becoming well aware, blogs are a killer app when it comes to search engines.

There’s an even better reason why blogs are compelling replacements for Web sites: Search engines positively love Weblogs because they’re content-centric and because they’re typically updated with great frequency. Put those together and it’s true that organizations with Weblogs are far more findable than those with just a Web site.

Remember, if you aren’t updating your site, you’re gradually becoming harder to find as newer, more compelling, more up-to-date content is bubbling up in the Google search results.

Dave Taylor’s a bright guy and his Intuitive Life Business Blog is worth adding to your RSS feeds.