I Want to Start a Blog, So Now What?
Blogs are not as scary to set up as you might think. Creating a blog is actually super duper easy, and you don’t necessarily need to be an HTML guru to get started. Once you’ve made the fantastic decision to start your very own blog, the first important choice you must make is what blogging platform will work best for you.
According to pingdom.com, More than a third of the top 100 blogs use a blogging service. Moveable Type (Typepad) is used by 16, Blogsmith is used by 14, Wordpress.com is used by 5 blogs, and Blogger is used by 3 blogs in the top 100. Click here to see the full list. However, this doesn’t mean that you should automatically go with the most widely used platform. Another option not mentioned is Drupal. I dont know much about Blogsmith, so I’m not going to address it here.
Here are some important things to note based on my experience:
- Blogger and Wordpress are free services, but the blog URL will be yourname.blogspot.com or yourname.wordpress.com. These are called “hosted services”, for which you don’t need to find your own web host.
- Using the Typepad hosted service, yourname.typepad.com will run you $4.95 per month.
- If you want your own domain name, like yourname.com, then you will need to fork out $8+/year for the domain name, $$ for hosting (this varies depending on your host and plan), and then an additional $8.95/month for Typepad. Don’t get me wrong: I love Typepad, and think it’s a fantastic service. In fact, their support and features overview is very user-friendly and especially easy to understand for beginners. It might be worth the cost if you have no technology experience. They are very friendly and helpful as well.
- Wordpress.org (different than Wordpress.com), Blogger, and Drupal are still free if you have your own URL and web host. There are additional set-up steps when you have your own domain and host, which may require some additional knowledge of how URLs, web hosts, and FTP work. If you can’t afford a host, you can redirect your domain name to a hosted service. For example, yourname.com can redirect to yourname.blogspot.com or similar. This can be done through the domain name registry where you get your domain name.
- Wordpress and Drupal are geared more toward tech-savvy bloggers. They also offer the largest variety of add-ons, and offer the most flexibility when it comes to content management. Drupal is the most complex and robust platform, and I would not recommend it for beginners.
Just an aside, Wordpress is the blogging platform that we use for Design Milk, Design for Mankind, The Daily Curl, and BAKERY [the whole site is built on Wordpress].
So, here are the questions that I suggest you ask yourself after you’ve made the decision to become a blogger:
- What’s my budget?
- How tech savvy am I, really?
- Am I OK with a hosted service domain name?
- How picky am I about the blog template (design of the site)?
- What kind of add-ons and options will I want to include on my site now or in the future?
When you can answer the above 4 questions, they will point you in the right direction. If they can’t, then we can!
This is a really important post.
Just wanted to add, from my own experience, that Blogger allows you to use your own domain for free, as well change your template completely at no cost.
Although I think Wordpress is, by far, the most professional tool, I would say that blogger won me over because of this “open-source” type of thing.
There’s also Tumblr, which is free and allows your own domain. Tumblr is designed to collect and dispaly all your online content, but can be set up to be a standard blog. There may be some limitations there with some features like archiving, though.
Blogger I have found good as per Alice’s post, the only real draw backs are the blogger header (can be hacked out), and I find the back end a bit too dumbed-down.
Yes, thanks Joe. http://www.tumblr.com is a great and VERY user friendly experience. I have typically seen it used for photo-blogging, but I certainly agree that it is a viable blogging platform. Thanks!
Another thing to be concerned about if using one of the freebie services — is the name you want available? We waited so long to get started blogging that there was the chance that our company name would have been taken. I think we were lucky, but when I ran off to get my preferred name for my personal blog — not so lucky.
what about squarespace?
Hi Melissa,
I had to Google squarespace
From working with several clients using TypePad, currently their search engine optimization stinks. It’s not impossible to make it search-engine friendly, but it’s pretty darn near close. WordPress (of either variety) rocks for that hands-down.
Sarah — I agree. Wordpress has some really fantastic plugins for SEO, too.
I don’t have experience with other services but I’m hardly curious since I have a deep & abiding love for Wordpress! I use .org and love all the custom features I can add and play with.
I’m not very tech-savvy but a quick Google search can generally answer my questions and provide code to copy & paste to get the desired effect.
I’ve found Wordpress.com to be great so far. I’ve just started my first blog with them, domain mapped it ($10USD) and added my own domain email and it’s all been pretty painless. I needed to go hosted because I not that tech savvy, but so far so good.
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Hey, I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say GREAT blog!…..I”ll be checking in on a regularly now….Keep up the good work!
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