For those of you who have been around WordPress for a while, you probably don’t lose any sleep pondering this question. But one of the students in the course I teach, Creating Websites with WordPress: A Bootcamp for Non-Techies, contacted me after the first class with a concern that essentially boiled down to this: “I signed up for this class to build a website, but I am concerned that my site will only be a blog. I don’t have anything against blogs, but I need my site to be more than that. What are we really going to build here?”
Part of their confusion probably lies in the fact that, when you first create your site (the class is using WordPress.com for starters), the system creates a blog page for you with a sample post and, by default, assigns the blog page as the home page. Another potentially contributing factor: one of the exercises assigned in the first class is to create several post articles; we don’t get to creating pages until the second class. But I think that perhaps most of the confusion lies in how the terms “blog” and “site” are so often used interchangeably in the World of WordPress, even in WordPress documentation.
Technically, a blog means something quite specific, i.e., a Web page that comprises a continuously updated online journal comprising a series of articles (or, posts) that contain a writer’s reflections, comments, opinions and often hyperlinks. The articles appear on the blog’s page in reverse chronological order. Typically, readers (or, followers) of the blog can subscribe to the blog in order to automatically receive a notification each time the writer posts a new article.
On the other hand, a site (or, website) is a more generic term, referring to a set — any set — of interconnected webpages, usually including a homepage, generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group, or organization. A given site may or may not include a blog page.
Despite the clear differences between these two terms, many people — myself included sometimes, I must admit — fall into the habit of referring to any site created using WordPress as a “blog”, whether or not the site actually includes a blog page. Given that WordPress was first created as a tool to enable the blogging process, this is understandable. But it can make the differences between the two concepts difficult for beginning web developers to grasp when the terms are used almost interchangeably.
I assured that student that there’s nothing to worry about: the WordPress Bootcamp course is all about creating sites with WordPress– and that they can choose to include a blog page in the site that they build, or they can have a “blog-less” site. It’s up to them as the editors of their sites.
Of course, there are a number of good reasons to include a blog page in one’s site, and I encourage my students to consider including one in their sites from the very beginning. But that’s the subject of another future post on my own blog here.