Differences between weblog and website

At the first glance, weblogs and website are both are both web pages, which have many similarities, but in fact there are many functional and structural differences between them. They both publish content on cyber space.
Weblogs mostly consist of text, images, and the other components which are displayed on the page according their adding date, the pages are usually updated by one person. A weblog might include publisher's individual memories, opinions and daily events.
Websites are webpages with unique URL, which are hosted on a webserver, and use HTTP protocol for data transferring. A webpage is accessible through the URL and a browser. Most of the websites have a main page, which contains different links that redirect users to the website others contents. Websites are mostly designed with special purpose, such as personal, commercial, governmental, or private institutes.

What is weblog?

Weblog is a free page on internet to locate information materials. The content that will be put by an author on a weblog will be displayed according their adding time. In the way, that the newest material will be first displayed.

Weblog word consists of web and log, in computer science log means the files, which register events. Also refers to daily report as well.
Weblog content might be consisting of personal memories, article, news and events, which are provided as text or image formats. In addition, the entire contents are available on one page, which might be achieved. These issues cause simplicity of weblog in compare with websites.
Some believe that Berners-Lee team has provided the first weblog; also, David Wigner created the first weblog (scripting news) on 1999. Brad Fits presented Live Journal on the same year. Also pitas.com was presented on that year by Andrew Smils in order to create news pages. And at last it was blogger.com which was provided by Evan Williams and Mac Hourigan.
Persian blogging began in Iran in 1381 by persianblog.com, after that blogsky.com and mihanblog.com began their activities, until Azar 1383 when blogfa.com was first launched. Today, weblogs contents are various, such as personal beliefs, scientific, artistic, religious, political, cultural and etc.

Blogging most significant features are as following:

• Free of charge
• Simplicity and lack of need for knowledge of programming and web design
• Possibility of archiving the content
• Content presentation as images, audio and videos
• Etc.

What is website?

Websites consist of different files such as text, image… we are uploaded on a server as their host. A website is called according the domain name which has been registered for it. So in order to have a website, it is required to design website and provide host and domain.

Websites are designed to cover a variety of purposes; among them we can mention the following:

• Informing and providing domestic news of organizations and universities and etc., or public news of news agencies.
• Commercial (products presentation, services, marketing, advertising, online sale, e-commerce and etc.)
• Educational (either free or by pay tuition fees)
• Corporate portals, organizations and government agencies to provide public services, or internal usage. And etc.

Website features:

• Web designing complications
• Cost running
• Possibility of changing appearance and content
• The high diversity of design tools and programming languages that can be used

Now after define and investigation of website and weblog features, we can have survey on their differences.

• Most of the websites are legally belonged to a company, organization and etc. whereas weblogs are mostly individual or have actual owner.
• Web designing is much more complicated than blogging and required knowledge of computer and coding.
• Web designing is a cost runner issue, whereas blogging is free of charge, and advertising are cost provider tools.
• Updating weblog content is much easier and faster than a website.
• Web sites often provide products, marketing, advertising and … services. But weblogs mostly include individual information or daily events.
• Blogs provide favorable environment for interaction between groups and people, and have more interact with users.
• Weblogs contents will be sorted according their adding time to the blog. But website content are clustered and classified in different sections.

In general we can say that both of websites and weblogs are places to provide information. A website mostly contains information about organizations, companies and products, but weblogs contain contents with different threads which are individually provided. Advantageous and disadvantageous of each one, is various based on their features.