Blogs are typically very inexpensive to set up, they are easy for beginners to maintain and update, incredibly powerful when it comes to amassing search engine traffic, and fun for the publishers and users alike.

The rise of blogging even prompted Problogger Darren Rowse to ask if the conventional business website is dead!

If you’re on the fence about what software to build your new website with, I’d highly recommend considering a WordPress-powered blog. Static, brochure sites are alright simply to create a web presence, but they’re certainly a relic from 1995. Blogs are the new, socially-driven, customer-friendly norm. Even if you don’t plan on updating your site with new content on a regular basis or enabling conversation on your blog, WordPress is even a great platform to run a static site too.

There are many things that both blogs and traditional sites can do, but there are several advantages blogs have:

Fast-Loading

Blogs tend to run lean and load quickly because of their dynamic template structure. Using PHP, your new blog splits up the different parts of your site (header, content, sidebar, footer) into separate files. This means that when you need to update an element of your site, you make the change once and it applies to all the pages across your whole blog site. On traditional websites, you used to have to copy those changes to every single HTML page of your old, clunky site!

Easy-to-Use

Once you have a theme selected, or a custom-designed layout for your WordPress-powered site, anybody can easily update the content of your pages or add new blog posts from the web-based admin panel. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can learn to publish with WordPress! And because the template-powered site separates your content from the structure and design of the site, you don’t really need any knowledge of XHTML or CSS. With traditional sites, you used to have to wait for your webmaster, or invest in an expensive web-authoring tool like Dreamweaver to help prevent people from inadvertently messing up the code behind your site!

Robots versus Humans!

Nowadays, blogs get listed on the search engines quickly and rank well because of frequent content updates. Search engines like Google and Yahoo send out robots or “spiders” that explore all the content on your website, looking at page titles, headlines, links, keywords, tags, and more, and just by creating a blog it means there is a lot of good information for the search engine spiders to crawl! WordPress is also built with SEO in mind so that while you write great content for people to read, it also optimizes all of these elements for the “robots” and helps your site to rank well in the search engines, faster.

Easily Network with Like-Minded People

Blogs are much more interactive and personal than conventional websites. Your readers can leave comments, share, bookmark, and email your content—basically helping promote your ideas and spread brand awareness for you—and you can even showcase your visitors or top commentators. It’s much easier to analyze your traffic, start discussions with your audience, and build a rapport with potential clients and partners. By paying attention to your visitors and fostering a community, you’ll quickly connect with like-minded people—users, other bloggers, and other businesspeople—who can collaborate with you and help you achieve your goals.

What are you waiting for! Learn more and go start your business blog now!

Cody is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.

Tags: Blogging, business website, Darren Rowse, Google, HTML, Problogger, search engine, search engines, seo, Social Media, traffic, web presence, WordPress