A Website or a Blog or Both?

August 3rd, 2010

If you have a personal domain name like mine (ramkumarkr.com), the biggest challenge you will face at some point is – whether should I make a website on this location or should I host a blog? Or can I have both, with my personal web pages in the front and blog in a sub directory? Or the website in the main site and a blog in a subdomain? What was your final decision on this?

I would like to share my experience in this. I too had similar doubts running in my mind when I bought this domain name. I initially setup a wordpress blog on the root directory, I never wanted a subdomain or a subdirectory. The reason was that, I didn’t want to treat them as separate entities, instead I want them to be controlled within a single control panel.

Now if you see my website, it’s a website to start with, and has a blog ‘attached to it’. In fact everything is under the single installation of wordpress, wherein I can edit my home page / about / contact or edit my navigation by editing the wordpress theme. In short, it’s a content management system built on wordpress!

In my past I was involved in developing a shopping portal built around WordPress’s CMS capabilities, from then I became a big fan of WordPress, such a nice software which you can tweak to any desired effect! Yes, that’s exactly I wanted to highlight.

So if you are convinced on the fact that you can combine your personal website and blog in this manner, let’s see how it can be achieved.

The steps involved are..

  • Designing a custom theme for your website / blog.
  • Install wordpress, install your custom theme.
  • Create ‘Pages’ in wordpress to represent the content for the main site.
  • Change the home page content and change it to look like a static page, than the default blog archive.
  • Make your /blog page to look like the blog archive.
  • Tweak your wordpress theme to accommodate the desired effects of a website.

My website didn’t get completed there, it is also made compatible for mobile devices. Just type in http://www.ramkumarkr.com/ on your mobile browser, and you can see a mobile compatible version of this site on mobile.

So, that’s in short, I do not wish to make this blog post lengthy, if you are interested to know more about this concept, do get in touch with me!

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