Blogging for fun and profit
What is a blog?
It is important to understand what a blog is in terms of the prevailing understanding vs. your concept or definition of a blog. You should also understand blogging and web production/usability best practices and accepted standards.
For example for a blog to be included in Google News, Google requires you post five posts a week. So if you add a new posts two or three times a month, you probably don’t have a “blog” in terms of the accepted definition. What you may have is something more like a “column” to steal a newspaper term, but only in a blog-like format.
A blog is a website arranged to facilitate the presentation of multiple units of categorized content, called posts, usually brief, that is consistently produced and published, usually at least daily, generally on a particular topic or genre, by one or many authors, usually seeking reader interaction or response via direct commenting or related social media or other websites.
A website can present content in an infinite number of ways depending upon how it is programmed as well as other factors. Generally a website presents pages that are static, that is the content does not change frequently, does not solicit comments, generally is not categorized and in general the content is not controversial and is designed to provide static information.
A blog, on the other hand, is comprised of many posts, that should be brief, are categorized by topic and date of publication (as posts may be time-sensitive, as opposed to static information) may be updated often, solicits reader interaction, may be controversial, usually provides an opportunity for the author to opine and invite others to reply.
Most blogs have posts arranged by date, the most recent, or perhaps a featured post, or several posts, perhaps in a slider, at the top, featured prominently on the homepage.
Older posts follow below, and eventually drop off the homepage and onto archived pages. This is because many, if not most, blogs, especially when blogging first began, concern current events and content would get stale fairly quickly. This is why date stamping of posts, both for when initially published and if subsequently updated is so important.
Posts vs. Pages
Posts are fairly short units of content, that are usually time-sensitive and categorized, a page can have a collection of one or more posts.
A Page, is usually static, that is not regularly changed, nor usually time-sensitive. Your “Contact Us” page or “About this Blog” pages usually don’t change often and are examples of when to use pages vs. posts on blogs.
