BlogSavvy, which I’ve been enjoying lately, asks Why on earth would you want a website? “This time round that hadn’t even popped into my mind… of course I was going to use WordPress to put it together, why would I waste my time and expend my energy on doing it any other way?” James really “gets” a lot of topics.
Blogs are really just the evolution of “web sites” if you think about it. It used to be that if you wanted to update content, you had to go through hoops, and the really good web sites updated really frequently. People returned to those painstakingly-updated sites because they were always fresh. It was only a matter of time before someone found a way to improve the update process so you could have fresh content without the hassle, and thus was born the weblog.
Yeah, it’s called a “blog”, but it’s still a web site. It’s just a better way to keep it fresh.
I’m willing to bet this is one of the reasons Macromedia sold everything (Dreamweaver) to Adobe. They saw the writing on the wall. Hell, I basically use my Dreamweaver MX app. as a glorified – maybe bloated – FTP management application. I gave up web sites and applications like Dreamwever as soon as I got used to WP and EditPlus … and my site is 100% better thanks to WP. No one needs a “web site” anymore, thanks to blogs.
Lets not get confused here.
A web site can be run on what is intended to be blog software, and not be a blog at all.
Hm… less coders and web designs knowing what they are doing, more mySpace tragedies. Everyone having a web space is a cool idea. So is everyone going to college. But somebody has to dig the ditches.
sA: I’m an editPlus user as well. The official Zend editor has some great completion functionality that I appreciate when doing a more PHP-heavy task. But EditPlus is definitely a sleeker app for the more css- and markup-heavy layout phase.
Hmmm… wondered why my stats had just gone ‘boom’ :o)
Thanks for the link & nice words Matt, I think WP is starting to change a lot of things!
I can see the wisdom in the question, but the fact remains that, no matter how lazy I’ve become in my old age, there is still a need for ‘sites’ as opposed to ‘weblogs’. Some of my content could be ported to weblog format, but I really don’t want the hassle of it (in two areas – templating and access permissions). I love WordPress a whole lot, but it can’t do everything.
I agree with Tristan. “Blogs” are the new websites. It’s a real misnomer for them to continue being called blogs, too. I have what one might call a blog, but it’s not so much a personal diary whining out to the world as it is thoughtful commentary; also on-site is a portfolio and other things (thanks to the wonders of Pages!).
Anyone willing to hard, hand code a website these days without the use of PHP and other time savers is to be commended, I suppose, but they’re also perhaps to be popped upside the head with a newspaper. It’s a lifesaver to not HAVE to have FTP all the time or use a cheesy website manager; editing from any computer in the world, and from more and more mobile phones, is the latest and greatest for now. And with domain packages and prices becoming cheaper as more roads open on ye olde information highway, people have fewer excuses to not go the whole nine yards and take on the power of blogging.
The bottom line is, though: blogs aren’t anything but websites. WordPress is nothing more than a site tool. ANYONE could have created WordPress, and Movable Type has had its hands in things for years now, as has b2 [and many, many others]. Databases, PHP, Perl, CGI, and dozens of other resources have been available for years, decades; just finally some people decided to put them to use, to put forth their power, and to open it all to the public, rather than leave it a mystery of just what’s controlling the big sites out there.
The problem that ‘traditional’ website creation tools is that WordPress is perfectly capable of running a ‘normal’ website if you add three lines of code to the templates. I have copies of Frontpage 2000 and Dreamweaver MX2004 sitting gathering dust on my shelf.
Apparently you’ve been enjoying it too much. I just got this message:
509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
Cheers. 😉