by Bruce Hartford

Technically speaking, a "blog" is simply a website that allows readers to post material to the site. (On standard websites that are not blogs, only the webmaster can post material.) Just to make things a little more confusing, a regular website can have one or more pages that are blogs, meaning the readers can post material on those pages, but not elsewhere.

But most people use the term "blog" to refer to any kind of website that is set up on a blog service such as wordpress.com or blogger.com. A blog service is a company that provides blogs to people. This discussion uses this definition for "blog," rather than the techical definition.

There are advantages and disadvantages to blogs compared to standard websites. As someone who has both, my two cents are:

1. A blog is cheaper (in fact, it's free in most cases)

2. It's usually easier for a non-techie to set-up, expand, tweak, and maintain a blog on a blog-service than a standard website.

3. Allowing readers to post material to the site (blogging) is usually automatically included. In most cases you should be able to turn that feature off if you don't want other people posting on your site.

Disadvantages of a blog vs a standard website:

1. Generally, the URL of the blog includes name of the blog service. For example, instead of mybook.com it's mybook.wordpress.com. Some blog services allow you to use your own URL (mybook.com) but they may charge you a fee, or it may be more complex to set up.

2. You have limited flexibility in regards to how the site looks, stuff you might want to do, and so on. This is an example of the rule that "Easier means less control and flexibility" (in other words, what you give up for having it be "easy" is that you have less freedom to do what you want to do).

3. Readers may have to endure ads, the revenue of which go to the blog company, not you.

4. A blog service may not allow you to set up an online store for selling your book. Or maybe they will, but they charge a fee.

1. Greater flexibility and capabilities in what you can do with it (but it's not as "easy")

2. A dedicated website with its own URL will probably show up higher in search-engine results than a blog (even if the blog has a "dedicated" URL).

3. I'm skeptical that there's much opportunity for a writer to garner paid commercial ads with either a website or a blog, but my guess is that a website's chances are slightly better.

4. May be easier to set up an online store where visitors can buy your books from your website.

Disadvantages of a standard website vs a blog:

1. Costs more. For an author's site I would guess $15-25/month plus $10-15/year for the domain registration (the URL), plus whatever you want to spend (if anything) for professional help in setting up and maintaining the site.

2. More complex to maintain, expand, tweak, etc.

3. More complicated to enable blogging on one or more pages if you want people to be able to post to your site.