I’ve become a firm believer that the website in the traditional sense is all but obsolete.

That’s right. The “Website” is dead, the Blog has risen to power, and it’s becoming harder for the big boys to compete with smaller businesses online. As a web designer for 11 years, I have seen technologies come and go, rise and fall, but the social shift in the web is leveling the playing field, and allowing small businesses to thrive.

** IMPORTANT NOTE TO THOSE WHO DISLIKE  BLOG LAYOUTS & FORMAT **
WordPress has the ability to emulate a traditional website, while retaining all the features I describe below. You can make a standard 1, 5, 20, 100 page website with WordPress, and no one would know it was built on a blogging platform!

Why Just WordPress, Why Not Any Other Blogging Platform, Like Blogger.com Or TypePad?

• Wordpress is an open source application, with thousands of plug-ins, or add-ons built by a huge and brilliant community. With 100,000 minds behind this system, and a sense of responsibility to provide an solid working product that rivals or bests anything you would pay thousands for.
• It’s available as a free self-hosted application, allowing you to store all your information on your own server, and get complete credit for the hits and page views.
• It’s extremely portable, and installs well on just about any server, hosting provider and operating system.

Here’s a few reasons to focus on a quality WordPress blog over a traditional website.

1. 

   
   

   The Price - It’s a helluva lot cheaper. Even free, if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty. Even a complete professional install can be done for as little as $100. You also don’t have to pay anyone to develop custom features, because just about everything you want to do is available as a free plug-in.
2. The Design - There’s a million themes available for free, the process to change the entire look of your website can be done with just a few clicks. There are also some absolutely amazing commercial theme providers, like WooThemes.com, that create the most effective and beautiful themes that need little or no customization other than a logo.
3. The Effort - When you want to add a page, edit content, update a new article, add or edit an image – you can do it with a few clicks. WordPress makes every action, every design element, every possible change extremely easy for anyone.
4. The Traffic - When you self-host a WordPress installation, you get full credit for all the traffic to your blog. This is in contrast with hosted solutions like Blogger.com and TypePad, where all your traffic is credited to the company, not you. Some companies are solving that problem, but as of now, a self hosted version is the absolute best.
5. The Security – When you use a WordPress back-end for your website, you get the advantages of spam prevention, user-level access with several tiers to allow complete control or just read privileges.

6. 

   
   

   The Search Engines - There isn’t another system that beats WordPress (with 4 simple plug-in additions and a couple settings changes) in the SEO department. Not only does WordPress easily allow you to optimize each page as you build it, it also actively informs hundreds of sites that your blog has been updated. With the proper free plug-ins,  meta tags, descriptions, keywords, page titles, page structure, redirecting out-dated pages, 301 redirects or anything else that gets overwhelming and/or expensive is all done for you on the back end, without you even knowing!
   
   Another amazing feature, with a little luck and effort, your website can be listed on Google within a couple hours of you writing your first page. This takes a few tricks I will be sharing in upcoming posts.
   
   
7. Communication With Customers - Does your website have the ability for your customers to easily leave feedback and communicate with other people on your site about your products or services? Remember, word of mouth still the largest method obtaining sales. If you give your customers a place to communicate, even if it’s heavily moderated, you can use their satisfaction with your product or service as a testimonial and selling tool.
   
   

8. 

   Image via CrunchBase

   Social Networking - Via plug-ins available for free, you can tie in all your social media profiles into your blog. You can send people to your blog to get to know you, your interests and your products or services. You can drive large amounts of people to your blog by participation in social networking, which will feed to your website, providing fresh links and resources to your visitors. It also shows your level of activity, and your willingness to communicate with the people who drive your business. When a customer knows you’re there and sees other customer’s satisfactorily answered queries, you look great compared to the big boys, with their archaic 800 numbers and automated operators. Embrace the people and they will embrace you.

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   Email Marketing - Using a plug-in called MailPress, you can add full auto-responder features with internal contact management, sequential and timed messages, blast capabilities and pre-built html and text-only themes to fit your business. This lets you avoid monthly fees and the separation of data between your website and a hosted solution. Your data is securely on your server and not in the hands of a company who may or may not be mining your data.
10. Support & Resources – WordPress’ development & user communities are extremely well informed. They built and use the system, and are willing to help for free. The people that built WordPress built it on the basic concept of free information. This is information you can use to make your blog better, faster, smarter, friendlier and more effective. And profitable.
    
    There are over 100,000 websites that talk about WordPress, blogging in general, making your blog better and profitable, building a reader base and add-ons to make your blog do some amazing things. These are almost always free, just like this article!

This was just a small collection of reasons building a WordPress blog will benefit you in the short term, mid-term and long term.

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Tags: blog design, blog maintenance, Blogger, Blogger.com, Blogging, Google, Search engine optimization, Social Media, social networking, twitter, TypePad, web 2.0, web design, Weblogs, website, wordpress