by Suzy Watts

Created on: August 24, 2009

My main hobby, after computing, is designing and creating greetings cards. For the past four years I have been producing cards and thankfully selling some of them. I sell at local craft fairs and to friends, so the next logical move was to open a website and increase my potential customer base. I already had a personal blog, where I used to chatter to anyone that was interested, but I wanted something more versatile to showcase my wares.

Web designing is really interesting, and if I was a lot younger, I would choose that as a way to earn my living. I would certainly prefer it to my current day job which is housekeeping, but that is another story.

Recently, I took the decision to become a writer, so naturally I needed to open a website for that section of my life. I also opened a blog for my writing persona, as I am finding that many writers, agents, publishers, etc. have a blog rather than a website. I also went down the Twitter route, for both my personal and business lives, but I had a bad experience during the recent cyber attack, when all my tweets disappeared, so I have removed myself from that particular social networking set-up.

Websites, I find, are much more flexible, can be any size from one page upwards, and have more options for layout, colour, theme, and all round personalization. You can have pages about yourself, your business and services, your pets, your photos, the possibilities are endless. Most hosting packages include a blog page with your website, so you don't really need a separate blog, do you?

The blog is basically a page of short essays, with a few extra bits and pieces thrown in. You can add a few details about yourself, a picture, some gadgets and gizmos, but essentially, it is one page, with a lot of one person's outpourings.

When I was researching my new career in writing, I looked at many websites and blogs about writing and publishing, and always took the websites more seriously than the blogs. A website to me is something almost tangible, with information, guidelines, hints and depth. A blog is basically one person having a nice little natter to themselves.

When I am surfing the web, I look for helpful websites which are visually pleasing, and which give clear instructions to point me in the right direction. If I am given a link to what I think is a website, and it turns out to be a blog, I tend to skim over it and not give it the serious consideration that I would give to a website.

A website is like a bright shop window; by comparison, a blog is like a black and white advert in a newspaper.

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