Home Building Metaphore

How blogs and other content management systems are like buying a really cool prefab instead of building a house

The advantage of a blog is that you can start your blog site with all the dynamic functionality prebuilt for you. Seemingly all you have to do with most blog programs (including Blogger, WordPress and Typepad) is set up an account, and then add your own words and pictures.

Most people find blogging as easy as using a word processor. (And it can be, except that a lot is happening behind the scenes.)

From a technical standpoint, blogs combine up-front functionality with backstage administrative tools -- both of which work dynamically. On the front end, the dynamic technology pulls content from a database to display to visitors to the blog. On the back end, dynamic technology enables bloggers to use any Web browser to enter headlines, images, and text into the database. (Learn more about how a blog works.)

Blogging enables people who aren’t programmers to create sites easily, using some of the most advanced technology on the Web. The result is a paradox: It’s easier to create a blog than a static site, and super easy to post articles and photos, but much harder to edit the design of a blog than a static site.

This seeming contradiction makes a little more sense if you can compare setting up a blog to building a house. Using a blogging program that sets up the underlying dynamic functionality for you is a little like buying a prefabricated house. With a prefab, you let someone else work out all the design and engineering challenges and put together the pieces. Then all you have to do is move in your furniture and paint your name on the mailbox.

You need advanced technical knowledge, however, if you’re editing the underlying code of a blog (or building a blog from scratch). It’s almost like building your own house by drawing your own plans and constructing it yourself. Continuing with the prefab metaphor, when you’re working on a blog, rearranging the furniture and even painting the walls isn’t that hard.

But what if you decide you want to add on a second story or take down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room? Well, now, that requires an engineer who has to first figure out the electrical wiring and plumbing that the original designer put in -- and then ensure that the changes you have in mind don’t conflict with a hidden quirk that could make a load-bearing wall collapse.

The blog equivalent is that you need a programmer for substantive changes such as adding new page designs or changing the functionality of how you add images -- and you have to make sure that all that new programming is set up to work properly on your Web server (which is a bit like needing permits from the city to add a second story).