Best Structure for New Website/Blog

[CharlieS]

I am almost ready to launch my new website/blog but I'm having one final debate I need to resolve before I release to the world.

Before I ask or present the situation, a little background may be helpful. The plan is for a niche website on Charter Sailing. The website will include both a blog and a forum (and lots of other stuff) Currently I am setup to startout with a blog only at ........../blog with a redirect from the root url to the blog subfolder.

Wordpress is the platform that is being used for the blog. SMF or maybe vBulletin will be used for the forum. Some might considered me a power user, but I am certainly not a web developer but I have a very good idea how things work and can figure things out. Since I don't want to spend my time on the technical details (I should be writing content and marketing the site), I am thinking about using Joomla (an open source CMS) for the main site. I have already concluded that a subdomain doesn't make sense in my case.

So what the heck is my question?

Will I be ok (from an SEO aspect, etc.) starting out with everyone being directed to my ......../blog directory until I later develop the balance of the site or would I be better off starting at the root of the site and then move the blog later to a subfolder. My concern with starting the blog at the root and moving later is that older links that have been spidered and bookmarked will no longer work. Actually I'm not even sure if permalinks work if the install directory of Wordpress is moved. Maybe I should just use Wordpress as my CMS instead of Joomla. My concern is that I will need more capability later than Wordpress can provide easily with its existing plugins/widgets.

Any comments?

[GoddessCarlie]

Hey Charlie!
You have a tough question there that you need to decide on. Wordpress is a very powerful CMS, but not as powerful as Joomla of course. With Wordpress you can make it so that your main page is a page with a link to your blog. It's under Options>Reading, and you can choose your main page to be a static page.

I'm not 100% familiar with Joomla, but I know it is much more powerful than Wordpress (and thus has a steeper learning curve). If you see yourself outgrowing wordpress very quickly then perhaps it will be advisable to start with Joomla (not activating all its features if that's possible, and just focus on building your blog). That way you could save alot of hassle in the future.

What you probably need to do is write down your aims, and then write the pros and cons of each situation. I find that when I write everything out it is clearer to see the big picture and often it is obvious what you should do.