I have posted an article over at .:Samplereactor.com:. which discusses my personal view points on why blogs make better homepages then the traditional webpage for artists. Posted below is the text from that article.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction
Over the past few years I have gone through a variety of web pages for my music projects. I started out with your classic Angelfire web page back in the late nineties when those seemed to be popular. I then moved on to standard web hosting, to mp3 sites, to everything in between. In the end I have finally decided to settle on a blog to actually act as my main webpage for my music projects.I initially started a blog about two years ago and linked to it off of my main homepage. After a few months of posting on my blog about my announcements and personal thoughts I quickly found that my blog was receiving more traffic then any other part of my webpage. As time continued to pass I slowly began to realize the inherent advantages of a blog over a traditional web page and eventually considered dropping my traditional website altogether.
What is a Blog?
Unless you have been living underneath a rock for the past five years, a blog is basically a webpage which organizes information chronologically down a webpage. Readers are usually able to easily comment on individual posts and in most cases they can create links, searches, keywords or emails of a particular post on a blog to send to whomever they wish.One of the misconceptions that most people have with a blog is that it is somehow different then a website. A blog is in fact a website just as any other website. The term blog really refers to nothing more then the style of layout used to present the information. The traditional blog layout consists of a center column of posts by the author with usually one or two sidebars along the edge of the page that contains topic information, links and so forth.In fact a blog can have nearly any layout and your yourself could easily implement a blog style into your existing web page with the effort of converting a few lines of code.Advantages to using a blog
Text Rich
One of the biggest advantages to using a blog is that blogs are inherently content and keyword rich. Search engines love to crawl for text and words through web pages for indexing and blogs provide search engines with a great deal of content because each post of information can contain keyboard rich titles, text and even tags. Tags are much like keywords that are used in meta data for websites, except that tags are easily seen by the reader and allow readers to search for similarly tagged information through blog based search engines.Feeds
Another huge advantage of blogs is the rss or atom feeds. A rss or atom feed is a small .XML document which allows readers to subscribe to your blog/webpage via email or through a feed reader. These email and feed subscriptions will automatically notify your readers of when there is new information on your website.Ease of Use
The ease of using a blog over a traditional website is one of the largest reasons why the blogsphere has exploded over the past two years. Most blog services will allow the user if they wish to never have to touch and html or CSS code. Posting to these services is a simple as opening your web browser, creating a new post with a title, inputting your text, and then hitting publish. The process is as simple as opening up a word processor and typing a paper. Most blog services also offer ad-free hosting that allows you to customize your code if you like.Content
Blogs have increasingly allowed users to offer a variety of content that traditional web pages have not been able to do. Users can now not only post text information, but blogs are allowing artists to post pictures, audio and video in a conveniently accessible format to the readers which was not previously possible.Traffic/Search Engines
Because of the rich content that is in blogs they are very often crawled by search engines on a regular basis. With a traditional website most people would do the rounds of submitting their website to a search engine for indexing and then leave it at that. You can certainly do this with a blog, because it is a website as any other. But blogs have the advantage of having their own specific search engines like Technorati.com which is specific for blog content. In addition bloggers can also submit their rss or atom feeds to search engines for indexing. All of this additional search engine capabilities gives blogs quite an advantage over traditional web pages.
Services
There are quite a few blog services out on the net right now, but the most popular services and software are Google's Blogger, Typepad, Livejournal, Xanga, and Wordpress. Almost all of these services offer ad-free hosting for free, but they also allow you to use their posting interfaces and still post to your own personal webhost with domain name.Disadvantages.
Personally I see very little disadvantages for the blog format, but one of the most glaring disadvantages of using a blog is that it does not allow you multiple webpages. The content by design for blogs is meant to be contained in a single webpage with archive webpages for past information. The easiest way to get around this drawback is to use your own webhost, which will allow you to create as many blogs or pages as you need for your particular site.Personal Example.
Just to demonstrate a personal example of how powerful a traffic builder a blog can be. I have posted below a web picture of my personal web stats from my own weblogs. In this picture you can clearly see that I have received a significant amount of traffic to my blogs. For personal promotion I have done nothing more then submit my blog to classic search engines, blog search engines, feed engines and then post on a regular basis.Remember, when looking at those stats, it is the stats for this month so far. It is as of this posting May 4th. Four days into the month.
I hope you enjoyed this article on blogs as a music web page. Tags: website tutorial blog
Introduction
Over the past few years I have gone through a variety of web pages for my music projects. I started out with your classic Angelfire web page back in the late nineties when those seemed to be popular. I then moved on to standard web hosting, to mp3 sites, to everything in between. In the end I have finally decided to settle on a blog to actually act as my main webpage for my music projects.I initially started a blog about two years ago and linked to it off of my main homepage. After a few months of posting on my blog about my announcements and personal thoughts I quickly found that my blog was receiving more traffic then any other part of my webpage. As time continued to pass I slowly began to realize the inherent advantages of a blog over a traditional web page and eventually considered dropping my traditional website altogether.
What is a Blog?
Unless you have been living underneath a rock for the past five years, a blog is basically a webpage which organizes information chronologically down a webpage. Readers are usually able to easily comment on individual posts and in most cases they can create links, searches, keywords or emails of a particular post on a blog to send to whomever they wish.One of the misconceptions that most people have with a blog is that it is somehow different then a website. A blog is in fact a website just as any other website. The term blog really refers to nothing more then the style of layout used to present the information. The traditional blog layout consists of a center column of posts by the author with usually one or two sidebars along the edge of the page that contains topic information, links and so forth.In fact a blog can have nearly any layout and your yourself could easily implement a blog style into your existing web page with the effort of converting a few lines of code.Advantages to using a blog
Text Rich
One of the biggest advantages to using a blog is that blogs are inherently content and keyword rich. Search engines love to crawl for text and words through web pages for indexing and blogs provide search engines with a great deal of content because each post of information can contain keyboard rich titles, text and even tags. Tags are much like keywords that are used in meta data for websites, except that tags are easily seen by the reader and allow readers to search for similarly tagged information through blog based search engines.Feeds
Another huge advantage of blogs is the rss or atom feeds. A rss or atom feed is a small .XML document which allows readers to subscribe to your blog/webpage via email or through a feed reader. These email and feed subscriptions will automatically notify your readers of when there is new information on your website.Ease of Use
The ease of using a blog over a traditional website is one of the largest reasons why the blogsphere has exploded over the past two years. Most blog services will allow the user if they wish to never have to touch and html or CSS code. Posting to these services is a simple as opening your web browser, creating a new post with a title, inputting your text, and then hitting publish. The process is as simple as opening up a word processor and typing a paper. Most blog services also offer ad-free hosting that allows you to customize your code if you like.Content
Blogs have increasingly allowed users to offer a variety of content that traditional web pages have not been able to do. Users can now not only post text information, but blogs are allowing artists to post pictures, audio and video in a conveniently accessible format to the readers which was not previously possible.Traffic/Search Engines
Because of the rich content that is in blogs they are very often crawled by search engines on a regular basis. With a traditional website most people would do the rounds of submitting their website to a search engine for indexing and then leave it at that. You can certainly do this with a blog, because it is a website as any other. But blogs have the advantage of having their own specific search engines like Technorati.com which is specific for blog content. In addition bloggers can also submit their rss or atom feeds to search engines for indexing. All of this additional search engine capabilities gives blogs quite an advantage over traditional web pages.
Services
There are quite a few blog services out on the net right now, but the most popular services and software are Google's Blogger, Typepad, Livejournal, Xanga, and Wordpress. Almost all of these services offer ad-free hosting for free, but they also allow you to use their posting interfaces and still post to your own personal webhost with domain name.Disadvantages.
Personally I see very little disadvantages for the blog format, but one of the most glaring disadvantages of using a blog is that it does not allow you multiple webpages. The content by design for blogs is meant to be contained in a single webpage with archive webpages for past information. The easiest way to get around this drawback is to use your own webhost, which will allow you to create as many blogs or pages as you need for your particular site.Personal Example.
Just to demonstrate a personal example of how powerful a traffic builder a blog can be. I have posted below a web picture of my personal web stats from my own weblogs. In this picture you can clearly see that I have received a significant amount of traffic to my blogs. For personal promotion I have done nothing more then submit my blog to classic search engines, blog search engines, feed engines and then post on a regular basis.Remember, when looking at those stats, it is the stats for this month so far. It is as of this posting May 4th. Four days into the month.
