I am noticing that a lot of people are using blogs as their main business website. If I had known, some months back, that Word Press sites could have regular site pages, I might have used Word Press as the host for my business site. As it was, I went with InMotion. I have mixed feelings about it. It’s been a generally quite satisfactory hosting company. But the bad thing about a regular site structure is that, even if you put up content regularly, it isn’t necessarily obvious that it’s new.
I ended up getting my site a blog to use as the “what’s new” section and my site links to it. I could have actually used my InMotion account to set up a blog, too, but I went with Word Press.
My personal blog is very happy with Blogspot. (If one is trying to acquire page rank, it makes sense for all their pages to have the same domain name. If not, Google Documents and Google Sites make fine add-on pages.)
Other experiences with blog and/or site hosting?

I have both: a website and a blog (this one is powered by Wordpress but w my own domain name, theme, graphics, host, etc. – therefore it isn’t free)…. they do connect together though. The benefits of having a blog is that we update it w new posts regularly and it is great for bringing Google juice . A traditional website is static and it brings less traffic even if we update it on a regular basis…. I always make sure to use the terms people will type in their Google search for info (the one I do provide) in each of my posts and usually my blog shows as first on the first page of their research. I definitely recommend a blog over a website for business….

InMotion is also a paid service, and I have my own domain name (though not server) — but I don’t think I could import my domain into WordPress when my contract expires. I’m not certain.
Ironically, I could have additional additional subdomains and even domains on my InMotion account — no additional fee — but I feel blog services (and even Google Sites) serve better for certain purposes. InMotion is a fine service, I will add, for some purposes.

After reading some other posts, I thought I’d put this thread back up and see if the discussion might reopen.

I am still using only one of the available domains on my paid InMotion account — but I maintain a Google blog, a (free) Wordpress blog, and a Google site (for a particular class I teach).

I keep reading rave reviews of Weebly — at Freetech4teachers and elsewhere; if I were starting out, instead of having my business identity split between WordPress and InMotion, it might be combined in Weebly.

I would definitely still have a Google blog, though!

Karen,

I agree with your thoughts. I use both a blog and a website. It depends what you want from your web presence. It is good that you use a blog for your “What’s New” section. That is a quick way to display new info.

Websites are good for a corporate presence. While blogs are good, they are not good for constant info that you want your clients to always see. Blogs show the latest info, but if you posted info 6 months ago, it will be hard to find. Your combo idea is a good solution.

About “importing your domain into Wordpress”: Set your blog and your web-site where you want and point your domain names to them. You might think of having one subdomain point to your blog and another point to your web-site. That way you don’t have to buy two domain names. Plus your web-site benefits from the presence of the blog and vice-versa. Even if you don’t renew your hosting contract, either keep your domain name or transfer it to where ever you want before it runs out.

Remember that a domain name is just like a TOC entry and has nothing to do with hosting (although some vendors tie the two together). All a domain name (DNS) does is point to the location of that name. All a host does is store your contents somewhere and provides services to connect to like the web, a database, etc. Then you put whatever content you want— within the limits of their TOS. The server itself doesn’t care if the content is a blog, a photogallery, or a radio station. However, there a few photogalleries that the host may object to being on their server.

About moving contents from one blog to another: From what I see by casually Googling, it looks like there are import/export functions in the WordPress dashboard which will help. Many systems also let you import/export via email. I know blogspot lets you make postings via email, and I’ve seen the capability of emailing blog posts.

About setting-up your own Wordpress blog: As long as you have PHP and some kind of SQL (a database) then you should be alright.

I’ve got my site and blog setup through the same interface. It has over 100 XP tips and security blogs. I haven’t been religious about posting blogs, I need to retrofit some SEO techniques I’ve learned while here, and I’ve just started posting Vista tips.

Thanks for the input. I think my InMotion website is paid for quite a few months yet, but I may eventually import it into a paid Wordpress account or…. I’ll also look into possibly having a site at Weebly. The InMotion sitebuilding software is pretty easy to use when it comes to building a static website, but other programs make it much easier to put up an attractive, functional blog.

There are a number of things, by the way, that Blogger will let you do that the free version of Wordpress will not let you do…. like embed flash, and certain other types of code.

The standard WordPress installation was not meant to have everything built in. It is kind of like Firefox in that sense. It is just a skeleton that you can improve on with free plugins.

I’m not tremendously familiar with Wordpress, but my specialty is based on the same idea. According to their web-site there are 7,170 free plugins and 1043 themes. Doing a simple search for “flash” in their directory for free plugins got me over 260 hits, most of them Flash players from what I can tell.

There are probably gobs of paid-for plugins and people who make a living writing code for Wordpress sites, but the plug-ins and themes mentioned above are free.

There is no reason to think you have to pay for anything. Remember, this is FOSS (Free Open Source Software) which means people get it for free, modify it, and sell it and their modifications.

Part of the issue is that WordPress is concerned about their shared servers crashing. One company noted that their widget currently couldn’t be placed on a free WordPress blog, but that they were negotiating with WordPress. They linked to an article that expained why WordPress stripped out some types of embed code.

Blogger has a javascript/HTML code widget that lets you embed all sorts of things: AuthorStream slideshows, TeacherTube MP3 players, Animoto videos….

I didn’t realize we were talking about “WordPress.com” which is just a site that administers the nitty-gritty of the software “WordPress” for you. The WordPress software can be installed, free of charge, on most any server.

Keep in mind that you are not limited to the boundaries set by one free server. If you find a host that better suits your needs except they don’t have WordPress, then WordPress can possibly be put on it. You probably already have a very good site waiting for you at your ISP. Or you could pay about $4 per month for a hosting site that will do the job at Godaddy. They used to be the cheapest but I don’t think that is true anymore.

I do have unused domains on my InMotion hosting plan (their business economy plan). Hmmm, should I be trying to import some of my stuff there?

If they meet the requirements for WordPress (PHP 4.3+, MySQL 4.0+, mod_rewrite on Apache) and can save you money then go for it. If they are like many hosts they have a way to install WordPress themselves. That will save you a little time and headache so it could be well worth asking them while you are checking the requirements.

The good thing about that arrangement is that an ISP is likely to stay in business for a while. But a free server depends on the whims of who ever runs the thing. I learned that lesson a while ago on a free hosted site in Spain (newsit.es). They are back online but my “free” account and the site I wrote are goners.

Just be sure the space and the bandwidth are not outrageously too small. The bandwidth need is best judged by experience, but the space is another matter. Of the biggest type of files what is the average size and how many do you expect? Is that more than InMotion provides?

If you need more then what you might want to do is store the big files elsewhere like Flickr and YouTube. The only three negatives is that your presence is split into your site and YouTube/yoursite, the control of your assets are no longer in your hands, and you’ve just added more things that can go wrong. YouTube probably will not go away tomorrow, but who would have thought that what was once the third biggest site on the Inet (geocities) would go away?

Actually I’m not surprised that geocities is gone… I refused to log onto any page that was hosted by them because of the annoying popups and the slow loading speed.
Anymore I think you get what you pay for…sites like squido or whatever have so many links that lead people to neverland away from your content and your page until they are not worth it!
The small price of 10.00 or so a month for a site that actually has your business and well being and content and that is on line 100% of the time and that has 24/7 tech support is worth its weight in gold!
All the “cheap” sites are just that… I think the revenue lost through down time and mis-routed visitors far outweighs the fee for actually paying for the site!
At the moment I am using Go- Daddy because they have 24 hr tech support and because they are affordable. If I get more into doing business on the web I will probably hire someone to do it for me so that I can spend my time doing what I do well… Creating content! and Creating in general… All the mental mast—- ing that goes into trying to figure the cheapest way to do things just makes me crazy. Just my little insanity showing through ;-)

@Dave, thanks for your responses.

@Alaina, what you are paying for GoDaddy is comparable to what I am paying for InMotion.

There may be people who use Squidoo as a website, but I do agree that it would be poor for that. It’s great, though, for people who produce more content than they can easily organize into a single website, or who like to write about different topics and either don’t want them all linked together, or just find that they don’t all fit together.

Also, if you produce enough content on other sites, and become active in their communities, they can drive people to your own site. In the past week, I have written five posts on my personal blog, three on my teaching blog, and one on my Google site’s mini-blog. I also put up one Squidoo page, and I’m getting ready to put up another….

The reason I got my business identity a WordPress blog…. Well, InMotion design software was just not that convenient for blogging. Splitting my main business identity between two sites was a lack of foresight, and I may want to fix that…. Outside of that, though, I have a lot of pages and sites because it’s what I like to do.

@karen – I have unlimited sites for I think less than 100.00 per year. I like that they have a real live person to talk to whenever I pick up the phone which might be 3:00AM and that that person has a clear grasp of my language and can answer my questions and can walk me through whatever mess I may have gotten myself into.
Not only do I have my own sites hosted for that price but the sites of several friends as well. Granted most of them are small with not much heavy video or audio so it might not serve you unless you put your things like Dave suggested.