When I’m teaching in my classes, private consulting sessions and teleseminars, one of the most common questions I get is, “”Can I build a regular website with blogging tools?”
And the answer is – absolutely, positively YES. In fact, I think it’s a terrific idea to do just that – especially if you don’t currently have a website and want to build a web presence! There are many examples of sites that look like “traditional” HTML sites, but are in fact built using blog software.
I recently built a Web site for financial coach Whitney Wogan using WordPress, a popular blogging tool. Here’s a screenshot of the finished site:
Looks like a regular website, doesn’t it?
Instead of using the regular “reverse chronological” format that blogs usually follow, Whitney used static content for most of the pages of her site (she turns off the built-in timestamp mechanism for these pages). The reader can then navigate through her easy-to-follow website, and her readers wouldn’t necessarily know they were looking at a WordPress site. She also added a traditional blog (you can find a link to the blog in her navigation bar, right under the banner). To take a look at the the full “Women with Money Moxie” Web site, click here.
Blog software and content management systems are very sophisticated these days, and many of them allow you to create both traditional blog posts AND regular, static “Pages”. I used WordPress pages to create all the main sections of Whitney’s site as well as the navigation, then created a blog section so she could update her site with regular postings.
Please note that not ALL Web sites are perfectly suited to the blog software format. If you need your site to be available to people to book hotel reservations, or if your site requires some other kind of heavy database functionality, blogging tools may not be the choice for you!
However, most content-based sites would be quite suitable for this type of set-up. And best of all, everything you build with blog software is easy to manage and update without having to use HTML. That’s a BIG bonus in tight economic times like these, when no business owner wants to be paying a high-priced designer or developer every time she wants to make a change to her web presence.
For more information about building your website using blogging tools like Typepad and WordPress, contact me for a free consultation! Blogging with Beth now offers custom WordPress site development and training packages.
