You thought about developing your own website and have decided to take the plunge. Before you do that, you might be wondering what is it that you want to develop, a website or a blog? In this post, I will talk about what is the difference between the two and what you should call yours, depending of course what you intend to develop in the first place.

The first thing you have to decide what is going to be the purpose of your website. Examples of which can be: to develop a programming related website like Stardeveloper.com, to develop a website which brings together a collection of best possible links to a given topic like Dzone.com, a forum on a focused topic like forums.asp.net, or to develop a website which focuses about you, your life, your interests, your areas of expertise. Once you have got past this, whether you call your website a "website" or a blog will become very easy.

While every thing that exists on the web can be generically called a "website", it is more proper to call your website a "website" if it is more about content and less about you. For instance, Stardeveloper.com is a focused website on contemporary programming languages. Its target audience is web developers. So if anybody asks me what I have developed, I tell them I have a "website" about web development. I don't call it a blog, because it is not about "me", it is about content. Similarly, slashdot.org is a website about news and twitter is a website about social networking.

A blog is any website that is about you, your interests, your hobbies, your life, and your thoughts on different topics. The moment someone tells me that he/she has a blog, I know immediately what that website will be like. I know that that website will be targeted towards posts on that person's thoughts about different topics. For instance, you can read Matt Cutt's ruminations on his blog. Likewise, I have a small segment on Stardeveloper.com where I post my personal thoughts and views on different topics, and I call it my blog.

So call your website a blog if it is more about you and your thoughts, and call it a website if it is anything else. Makes sense?