The message you aim to tell, and the medium with which you aim to tell your story, greatly affects the sort of website you require. Another affect is more global, and that is the rise of mobile devices like smart phones and tablet computers.
What I mean is the shape of the website shapes the story you're telling.
A blog is episodic, with each posting building on the previous ones. Blogs are websites that are organized in reverse chronological order. Let's start, though, with defining a website.
The "Web" (a.k.a. World Wide Web) is one of the services that run over the Internet. The Web is built from "Web Pages" (you're reading a web page right now), and a "Web Site" is a collection of web pages.
To make it simpler for humans, web sites are known by domain names - like, my blog about green transportation and electric vehicles is at the domain longtailpipe.com, while my blog about electric vehicle racing is at electricracenews.com.
Because blogs are collections of web pages hosted at a domain name, a blog is a kind of web site where the content is organized in reverse chronological order. That is, the most recent posting on a blog is shown at the top of the front page, the next most recent after that, and so on.
That reverse chronological organization is why I say blogs are episodic in nature.
Blogs are great for covering current news. They're not so great if you want to organize your content in a different way.
For example, printed books are organized by chapters, have a table of contents at the front, and an index at the rear. Websites can be far more flexible than printed books ever thought of being. The point, though, is books are organized around a topical structure rather than a time/date based structure.
With a blog website it's possible to use topical structuring along with a date based structuring. We're doing so on this site, which is hosted by Blogger, but we're using the sidebar to provide a topical structure.
Another common story telling method is the podcast, whether audio or video. Podcasts are definitely episodic, and are always delivered to the audience via an RSS feed. Hence, to host a Podcast you start with a blogging platform, with Wordpress being a popular choice.
I said earlier that websites can be far more flexible than books. A Wiki is an example of this, where the links between pages are arbitrary depending on the content of each page. On Wiki's each page is a standalone entity, which typically refer to other pages either on the same site or elsewhere.
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