Suzanne Falter-Barns recently interviewed Andy Wibbels, author of Blogwild!, at Problogger.net. The topic in question:

Have Blogs Killed Conventional Websites?

It’s an easy read—a brief summary of insights from Andy, one of the early evangelists of this powerful new communications channel—but it proves a great point:

Blogs are cheap, easy, efficient, wildly easy to find on the Net, super marketing-friendly, and just plain fun. They work rings around websites.

If you’re on the fence about what software to build your new website with, I’d highly recommend considering a WordPress-powered blog. Static, brochure sites are alright simply to create a web presence, but they’re certainly a relic from 1995. Blogs are the new, socially-driven, customer-friendly norm. Even if you don’t plan on updating your site with new content on a regular basis or enabling conversation on your blog, WordPress is even a great platform to run a static site too. There are many things that both blogs and traditional sites can do, but there are several advantages blogs have:

• Blogs tend to run lean and load quickly because of their dynamic template structure. Using PHP, your new blog splits up the different parts of your site (header, content, sidebar, footer) into separate files. This means that when you need to update an element of your site, you make the change once and it applies to all the pages across your whole blog site. On traditional websites, you used to have to copy those changes to every single HTML page of your old, clunky site!
• Once you have a theme selected, or perhaps your own custom designed layout for your WordPress-powered site, anybody can easily update the content of your pages or add new blog posts from the web-based admin panel. And because the template-powered site separates your content from the structure and design of the site, you don’t need any knowledge of XHTML or CSS. With traditional sites, you used to have to wait for your webmaster, or invest in an expensive web-authoring tool like Dreamweaver to help prevent people from inadvertently messing up the code behind your site!
• Nowadays, blogs get listed on the search engines quickly and rank well because of frequent content updates. This means there is a lot of good information for the search engine “spiders” to crawl!
• Blogs are much more interactive than conventional websites. Your readers can leave comments, share, bookmark, and email your content, and you can even showcase your visitors or top commentators. It’s much easier to analyze your traffic, start discussions with your audience, and build a rapport with potential clients and partners.

These are four of my favorite benefits of using WordPress to power a new business site. But check out the full post on Problogger.net to see Andy Wibbels’ 13 comparisons between blogs versus traditional websites.

[source: Have Blogs Killed Conventional Websites? on Problogger]