Understanding the Difference Between a Website and a Blog

Although Blogs can be difficult to define they are instantly recognizable as they all have a common form.

They consist of a web page with new content at the top ( ordered by date of entry latest on top) , and links to older content or other sites on the side.

They were originally intended as online journals which is why they are organised by date.

A traditional website is usually ordered by subject and not by date. In fact when you look at a web page on a standard website you have no idea of when it was created or by whom.

However a blog page uses the same underlying technology as a standard web page (HTML), and so in reality a blog page is also a web page and a blog is a website. I consider a blog to simply be a particular form of website.

In fact even before blogs, as we now know them, came into being many websites were being run as online journals, but the webmaster had to create the date based layout manually.

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997.

The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase weblog in the sidebar of his Blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999–

Source Wikipedia

The creation of tools to enable non technical users to create a blog, and free hosting service led to the rapid expansion of Blogs from 100 in 1997 to over 20 million in 2005.

Because of the success and flexibility of the blogging platforms like Wordpress many webmasters are now starting to use the blogging plaforms as traditional websites by arranging the site content by subject and not by date.

So, in summary, a website can be used as a blog and a blog can be used as a website.