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Building A Website Over A Blog

This is a continuation from the post Blog Or Website?

How does this work? Do you have to rewrite all the articles for the website?

Not at all. Here is how I see it. My blog is based on WordPress. I will use it as an example here. The blog as the owner or the visitor sees it it really a nice front-end, or user-interface. Sitting behind the blog as you see it, is a database that is the collection of all the content that you have created. WordPress uses MySql as its database. The blog front-end basically saves you from having to deal directly with the MySql database. You operate the blog from the WordPress user-interface.

Let me try to summarize this. All the content that you are putting into your blog is inside a database. The blog uses or “sits on top of” the database and gives you a simple way to operate it.

For your day to day posting and maintaining your articles, comments, categories, etc, the blog interface is simple, efficient and gives you all the knobs that you need.

But what if you have the grand vision of writing some big articles on a topic in your website. The combination of the blog and a website gives you just that.

Let us say you have a lot of things to write about say, cars of the future. You may know enough to write ten short articles in the next week or so. But your vision is to write a very detailed account based on a lot of research. This is how you go about this. Start with what you know and keep posting them as blog posts. Try to use a common tag in all those posts, and put them in one category if you like. While you are writing these articles, you can be doing research on your future posts. So by contributing little by little to your blog, you can accumulate a significant amount of content over time.

When you reach a point where you think that you have researched enough and have written all that you had in mind, you can now write a new article in your website that ties all your blog posts together nicely, by referencing them as links (not copying them verbatim).

Extending our analogy of the “blog sitting on top of a database,” we can say that your website sits on top of your blog. You can make your website as pretty as you want and easy to read and browse, while all the real content is really coming from your blog (which in turn, is coming from your database). If I can use some engineering terms, your website is built on a layered architecture. You have the database layer at the very bottom. The blog layer sits on top of it. And your website layer rides on your blog. Of course, the database itself rides over other layers in your webserver, but that is for the techies, and not of interest in this context.

So if you set up a blog and a website over it, how do you use them both?

That is discussed in the post Why Both A Blog And A Website?.

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