What is a Blogsite and What is WordPress?

A blogsite, or simply a blog, is simply another version of the word weblog. A weblog is a site that is usually focused on one specific topic and consistently posts fresh, new content. It is frequently updated, used sort of like an online diary, and usually contains more personal commentary than a regular website.

Blogs, with features like trackbacks, pingbacks, and leave a comment, offer a whole new level of interaction with site visitors, allowing your content to start and participate in online conversations. The archiving options (by date or category) that blogs offer are also a great way to organize articles on websites.

Another popular blog feature is the options for feed syndication. The most common forms of feed syndication are RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom. Blogs publish feeds of their content, usually in XML, so that users can subscribe or sign up to have the content sent right to them by email or in a feed reader. Visitors can add the RSS feed links for their favorite blogs to their feed reader, and it will inform them whenever there are new posts.

What is WordPress?

Here is the definition from the www.wordpress.org website: WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress websites and blogsites can be completely custom built from scratch, or an existing WordPress theme or template can be used as a based and then customized. Basically, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

WordPress is an Open Source project. That means hundreds of people all over the world are working on it and creating applications and plug-ins that work with it. It also means you can use WordPress for any website you want without being required to pay anyone a license fee. It was originally designed just for blogging. But because it is so powerful, many developers have created functional and helpful plug-ins that work with WordPress, making it a great tool for the development of business websites as well.

In a standard HTML/CSS website, each page and all of its content is a separate file and in most cases, the page files contain the code for the design and layout as well as the content. Anytime you want to make a change, you have to make it to each page it affects and re-upload the updated files to your server through an FTP account.

With WordPress, all of the content for each page is stored in a single database. The design and aesthetics of the site are stored in separate files that define the theme (template/skin) of the blog site. This makes updating the design and layout of the site much easier, because you only have to make revisions to the theme files, not the content. Likewise, it means all of your content changes can be made in one place.

You can learn more about WordPress in my blog post: 6 Reasons WordPress Is Perfect For Your Business Website.