by David B Hitchcock

Created on: May 15, 2009

What type of Internet portal is best for promoting your work: A website or a blog?

Can you play me a tune, or would you like your books balanced?

The easy answer is a website. It's easy because it's more traditional, and easier to understand. If you are an accounting company, you want to be seen as old fashioned and reliable by your customers, so a blog is not your cup of tea. A website is the best choice for many businesses, with the blog being the best choice for only a few types of businesses, such as musicians for example.

One of the more traditional website types can serve a number of businesses really well. These types include the virtual business card website, the standard multi-page business website, the online catalog website, and the business blogging website.

The virtual business card

This business website is a one page site that has all the contact and product or service information on one page. It's like a mix of a business card and an ad poster. The benefit of this style is it's the very concept of design it and forget it - a static page that never changes. That makes it cheap, easy, and reliable which is ideal for small businesses that are not computer or electronic savvy. The down side of this virtual business card website is that it looks like a cheap ad poster generally. Also if any information changes about the company, the page needs to be changed and then it's not as static a page as the owners thought. And with no new content being posted, existing customers have no reason to bother coming back to check it out - they've been there and seen everything this company has to offer.

Standard multi-page business website

A typical business website has multiple pages, generally one for each topic you want to talk about such as Products, Services, Customer Support, News, About Us, and so on. These help customers navigate to the information they need faster and more easily. Some pages are as unchanging as the static virtual business card page, where others are updated on a regular basis. Its common for the home page (where you arrive at initially on the website), to be updated frequently to draw customers' attention to new items, changes, or promotions. The next most frequently changed page is the News or Press Release page where news, events, promotions, product releases, and other news-worthy items about the business are posted. Many businesses use RSS, a new technology that allows customers to subscribe to and get notified when there is

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>