Blogging – The Quickest Way to Build a Website

What’s the quickest way to build a website these days? Without a doubt – its a blog.

What is a blog? I’ll keep it simple, its software like Blogger, WordPress, Moveable Type, or LiveJournal. According to Wikipedia, this type of content management software typically provides the following features for a website publisher:

• Title – The name of the article or page
• Body – The actual content: articles, media, etc
• Permalink – the permanent URL to access the page
• Post Date – Let readers know when the content was made (optional)
• Comments – Allow users to leave a response (optional)
• Categories – Break down the blog’s topics into subgroups
• Trackback and or pingback – a list of other sites that link to the page

Basically, blog software provides everything a website publisher needs to get started (other than the actual content!) From an SEO perspective, all of the essential elements are customizable. Titles, URLs, meta info – these can be essential, but they’re also easily managed with a blog.

Starting a Blog

The blog itself is a piece of software and corresponding database entries that compose a website that surfers connected to the internet can access. To get this software and database information connected to the net, you’ll need to think about website hosting.

There are basically two hosting choices for newcomers who want to start a blog:

Developer Hosting

Many of the developers of Blogging software also offer free hosting for blogs. Blogger, WordPress, and Blog.com all offer some form of free blog hosting. Without a doubt, this is the quickest way to build a website – and the cheapest, too. For absolutely nothing down and filling out a three-minute web form, you can have your account set up and ready to customize or publish your first posts. Click here to learn more about popular free hosting that you can use for blogs or even quick static pages.

Leased Hosting

Obviously, there are limitations and problems with free hosting.  For this reason, renting or leasing some website hosting space can be a good investment in the long run if you’re planning to ever turn your website into a commercial endeavor.  Installing the blog software yourself is a little more complicated and technically demanding than signing up for a free blogging service, but with most hosts these days a few clicks with an installation script will accomplish building your new blog website.

Once Your Website Goes Online

When the account is set up and the blog installed at your unique URL, domain, or subdomain – all you really need to do is write.  Or make music, or videos, or pictures – whatever kind of content you want to share and publish.  Filling out a blog post is about as easy as writing a forum post.  Heck, its only a little bit more customizable than the dang comment boxes we fill out on other peoples’ blogs.

As soon as you fill up the required fields and hit publish, that post is now visible across the internet to anyone who follows a link in to the URL or types it into their browser bar.