A couple of years ago, which is a long time by web standards, the way to build a website was to use HTML. A lot of pretty websites were built this way. A lot of ugly ones were built this way too; but that is another blog entry. Although these HTML sites were pretty, they were static websites. Every time someone visited the static website, they would display the same page of information. Hence, the term static website.
Fast forward to one year ago and we saw the emergence of blogs. WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, and other companies made it relatively easy for most web users to create a private website. The website just happened to be called a blog (or weblog), but they were full fledged websites. The difference being that blog content changed more frequently. Every time a blog owner added an entry or blog, their website landing page would change to show the new entry.
Search engines loved this. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engine spiders hung around blog websites like paparazzi hang around celebrity hideouts. This was not surprising since search engines would not survive without fresh content. Blogs fed the spiders content food that the spiders were happy to serve up on the search results. Blogs began to rank very high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Now the spiders had another place to index content in addition to the press release sites and the article sites.
For bloggers, this was good news. In a sense, the search engines made many of them online celebrities. But what about the owners of static websites, who comprised of business owners? How would they get a piece of stardom from the SERPs? Good question. . . Many of the static website owners tried to ride the wave by bolting on a “/blog/” directory to their static website. For example,
www.Acme.com/blog/
Eventually, most web consultants advised their clients to add a blog to their HTML website. Now their client would have a static website and a blog. “Wow,” I say, “How clunky.”
A WordPress blog can do anything that a static website can do. . . and more. The first trick that a WordPress blog can do is that it can transform itself into a static website. Here’s how:
- Go into the WordPress admin panel.
- Click on “Options” then on “Reading.”
- Choose which type of website landing page you prefer: static website or blog style.
You now have a static landing page if you want one.
From this first trick, the WordPress blog platform pulls away from an HTML website in terms of ease of use. Since WordPress is built on open source, it has a huge and dedicated community of developers and users. In the last couple of years, there has been a large number of very useful WordPress plugins that extend the functionality of the basic WordPress platform. Among them, easy SEO, automatic sitemap creation, widgets so that a nontechie can change many aspects of their web design, and themes. It seems like a new plugin and/or theme is releasted everyday.
In my future articles, I will go into more detail about how business owners can take advantage of WordPress for more than blogging.
