Building A Blog or Website | How To Pick Your Preferred Type
Nowadays it’s getting easier and easier to build websites. Gone are the days when your only web design tool was the HTML editor. It’s even possible to create a website or blog without using the HTML editor at all.
If you simply want to play around with website creation, then try one of the "paid" services as most provide free trials as well. So whenever you decide to go ahead, there's no more learning curve to worry about.
There are many ways to build your online presence through building websites such as:
- Hire a webmaster to do the work for you. This obviously can be costly or,
- Hire a freelance webmaster at www.elance.com for example or,
- Use mix-and-match website building system or,
- Build your own.
Surely the path you choose will depend mainly on your own expertise, timing and budget.
Building Your Own Websites
The choices are abound and depend mainly on your goals – why do you want a website in the first place. Presently, these are typical site types that you see in the websphere:
- Static website. This is one of the earliest form of websites and still in use today.
- A blog. You may choose free blog services or build your own on your hosting server. See “Blog Services” below for free blog system providers.
- An ecommerce site. A website with the ability to allow commercial transactions with the visitors. Typically enhanced with shopping cart and payment processors. There many systems on which an ecommerce website can be built upon. Among the popular ones are OsCommerce, Zencart and the like. Even a Joomla or Wordpress site can turn into an ecommerce one by using appropriate plugins and themes.
- A community site. This trend has been started by bulletin boards or forums and its popularity is still very much alive. Common forum platforms are phpBB, Simple Machine etc.
- Bookmarking site. Examples are Digg, Delicio.us, Technorati etc.
- A social networking site. This can be a full-fledged version such as Facebook and MySpace and lesser ones such as Twitter and Plurk. Free versions can be found at www.Ning.com or Dolphin Community Builder.
- Membership site or club, free or paid. Get info about membership sites here.
- Video sharing site. Popular ones are YouTube, Revver etc. A good free video site script is phpMotion.
- File sharing site. Metacafe is one good example.
- Tutorial site. About.com and many many others.
- File download site. Download.com is a very popular one.
- Auction site. The king here is eBay.com.
- Article site. Examples are EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com.
- Answer site. Pioneered by Yahoo with its YahooAnswer.com.
- Job offer for freelancers such elance.com, guru.com and so on.
In fact, there are many more types than I can write here!
Blog Services
Popular free services include WordPress.com and Blogger or BlogSpot. These free services may have restrictions that don’t go well with your goals so do proceed with caution. Pluses are that you need to do less maintenance in this scenario.
If you’re inclined to use your own domain, among the favorite blog platforms are WordPress.org(hosted), Joomla and Drupal. While you’re having a lot more control over your site, it also means you will need a lot more effort in creating and maintaining it.
Blogs have taken over static websites due to several factors:
- Easy to setup.
- Easy to update contents.
- Features are simple to add.
- There are plenty of free blog services available.
- Mostly favored by search engines.
- Has an advantage in pinging and trackbacking.
Wait! Just Don’t Go This Route
Also gone into history book are free static website services such as Freewebs, Geocities, Tripod, FortuneCity and many many others. So I don’t recommend that you choose them to build your web presence.
There are several reasons for not favoring this including:
- Having URLs that end with yoursite.tripod.com and the like will give "unprofessional" impression to your website visitors.
- The providers tend to stuff your web pages with ads that may not suit your site target visitors.
- Another big minus is that you don't have the liberty to design a site as per your liking. In most cases, you’re stuck with limited layout styles and templates.
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