I strongly believe that the business blog can serve as the main website and blog at the same time. Blogs have evolved to what is known as CMS, or content management system.

Wikipedia, the world renown online encylopedia defines a content management system as follows:

“A Content Management System (CMS) is a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based.”

Wikipedia goes on to describe these procedures:

1) Allow for a large number of people to contribute to and share stored data
2) Control access to data, based on user roles. User roles define what information each user can view or edit
3) Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
4) Reduce repetitive duplicate input
5) Improve the ease of report writing
6) Improve communication between users

So, with all that said, blogs are your solution to these functions!

You may be surfing your favorite websites and not even know that they are blogs. The line is blurring between what a conventional website looks like versus a CMS style blog.

What is a “CMS” site? As defined in www.wikipedia.org “A ‘web content management’ (WCM) system is a CMS designed to simplify the publication of web content to Web sites, in particular allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files.”

“Usually the software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease of use.” This is what blog software does.

“Most systems use a database to store content, metadata, and/or artifacts that might be needed by the system. Content is frequently, but not universally, stored as XML, to facilitate reuse and enable flexible presentation options.” Blog software is built to lay upon an SQL database within the webhost.

“A presentation layer displays the content to regular Web-site visitors based on a set of templates.” Most blog software allows for interface of weblog templates.

“Administration is typically done through browser-based interfaces.” Blog software includes an administrative panel to control the insertion and modification of content.

So, as you can see, with the above features built in, a full flegded website for a business can be constructed.

Darren Rowse from Problogger.com has laid it out the best with many definitions about it. See his link here.

Some of the sources who identified what a blog is are from Harvard Law school, online dictionaries, computer “geek” sites, Wikipedia, and so on.

1. “a weblog is a hierarchy of text, images and media objects and data, arranged chronologically that can be viewed in an HTML brower.”
2. “A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences.”
3. From “Web log.” A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”‘

You get the idea. Our own definition adds on to all the above.

“A blog is an ongoing diary of information that is posted in reverse chronological order that serves the purpose of attracting online traffic in a dynamic manner. While attracting this traffic, it allows for the blogger to form a “bond” with its audience to further get feedback and thus result in “community.”