Should you have a stand-alone blog?

As I said in my previous post, back in the old days blogs and websites used different kinds of programming platforms, and were therefore considered totally separate identities.

Therefore for those up-and-coming digital marketers who realised the potential of blogs for business, it was necessary to create a blog sitting alongside your website.

But with the development of CMS and the birth of the blogsite (a blog that has become a website, and therefore already has a blog incorporated within it), there was no need to have a separate blog.

Nevertheless not all websites are made with CMS such as WordPress, which is, of course, a blogging platform. There are still some die-hard programmers who prefer to build websites using coding language or another form of website design package. And in this case a WordPress.com blog would be an ideal solution, free, easy to set up and use, and requires next to no specialist knowledge to create or maintain.

But there is the problem of making your blog look like your website, or as close to it as possible. This is in spite of WordPress.com providing its users with over 200 themes (or templates) to improve the blog’s presentation and look, none of them will match your website exactly. So the art is to recognise an existing theme that has potential and can be adapted to resemble what you are looking for as closely as possible.

Here is an example of what I mean – first the website:

and the WordPress.com blog made to go alongside it:

It’s not the same, but it’s not far off!

So back to the question in the headline – a separate blog will work if there is regular content with suitable contextual links back to the website, whereas a blogsite won’t require these links because it is already part of the website. Both will work better with excellent search engine optimisation and plenty of fantastic posted material, and although the WordPress.com will have WordPress behind it to help with its indexing, a blogsite suitably armed bristling with SEO plugins and other helpful applications will probably perform better.

But don’t let that put you off creating a separate blog, as it would be far worse if you had no blog at all!

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Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott writes the award winning Fairy Blog Mother blog for beginner and post-beginner bloggers to “explain things really simply” about blogging and WordPress. She provides simple, easy to understand, highly visual courses and tutorials using ordinary, everyday words. Visit her new Beginner Bloggers blog to find her latest learning resources.