First my own experience - I write for a blog and website called Qatar Visitor. This is one of a network of blogs and websites - there is also Japan Visitor, Devon Visitor, Soccerphile ( football and sport website) and a few others. I've wanted to write about their relative strengths for a while, based on our experience, but unfortunately it doesn't really tie in with what we do. But with Hub pages you can write about something on any topic, so here goes...

First a blog is incredibly easy to set up. We use blogger, although we may use word press for future blogs, and it literally takes minutes to set up. You can also customise using a drag and drop feature, although this is still a bit limited - you really need to go into the css and html to get the exact look you want. This is still a lot easier than building a website from scratch!

I find that when making a web page I can easily spend an hour or more fiddling about with little bits of code, then copying and pasting it from dreamweaver into our cms, uploading images onto the website and then adding it into the page and so on.

On price, the blog definitely wins out. For our website, we paid someone to set up the cms, we pay for hosting and are currently paying a company to install a comments system - all this comes free with blogger. You can even purchase your own url and use with free blogger hosting!

Our website wins out here by a factor of about four! Although the blog is older by about nine months, has tonnes of links and has unqiue posts (or they were unique!) and often ranks higher, we get a five times more people visiting the website.

It's still a little bit of a mystery to me why, but I think that people who are a little less internet-savvy just prefer websites.

"I don't visit blogs," said one older women I spoke to. "I don't understand them - what are they there for?"

Our blog definitely seems to pick up more links. There are also a ton of blog directories - blogtoplist, topblogarea and so on - and unlike web directories these actually seem to make a difference. I have just put the key words Qatar Visitor into the search engine now and I can see that two of these directories are appearing in the top ten results (out of 341,000) just for their listing of us.

Blogs are also great for linking up with other blogs, and I have found some blogs in Qatar have just linked to ours without any requests for reciprocal links.

On the other hand, the website seems better for heavier links - we have had one from a newspaper and several from Wikipedia - which, though they use nofollow tags, are great for traffic.

Thre is a big difference here. When I put something on the blog it almost immediately out on the net. The rss of several blog sites picks it up, I see it on google alerts and it often appears in the top ten for its key words. On the other hand, I have found it can take two weeks for a website article to be picked up. I find myself in the ridiculous situation of spending hours (or a couple of hundred dollars) on an article for the website, only for the promotional blog post I knocked up in ten minutes to be out on the internet first.

This is the killer for me. I have set up static websites and there they have remained, happy and content, not requiring any work or updating. But the blog is different. It sits there, demanding updates. If someone goes to your blog and you haven't written anything for a while, they leave. The blog is then dead.

To keep it alive it requires constant feeding. It stops you from doing other things. It plies you with guilt. It lurks there at the back of your minding, nagging, pleading, roaring... It is a monster!

There's no contest here for me - the website wins hands down. I've just gone to the google adsense and done a quick calculation, and for this month the blog has earned 4% of the total reveune for the blog and the website. That's just adsense - we have sold absolutely no advertising on the blog,

So is it better to have a website or a blog?

The answer, I'm afraid, is to have both. The blog is a brilliant promotion tool, and great for getting links and pr (which can then be directed towards your website.) For us it is also one of the biggest sources of traffic after the search engines. It also means you can get some information/announcements up in ten minutes, and allows you to interact easily with your readers. Your website, on the other hand, get more traffic and revenue.

However, if I had to choose between the two, I would go for a website - for revenue, traffic - and because you don't have to update it every bloody day!