Last week, we discussed finding the best niche theme for your blog, approaching the process in much the same way writers do when developing any super-awesome idea for the world of print media.
Moving right along, your next logical step would be finding a publisher — or, in your case, blogging platform — that could bring your idea to life.
Book authors begin targeting agents or publishing houses, while journalists begin considering the best publications to pitch to. Sometimes, overcome by wild fits of desperation or overeagerness, some writers make the mistake of sending out their ideas en masse, with no regard as to whether or not the recipient can provide the best sort of support for their idea.
This is not smart. And as we’re smarter than the average blogger here at Smarter Than Your Average Blog, we’re going to stop to consider the various types of blogging platforms, and what they can provide for various types of bloggers.
Darren Rouse over at ProBlogger briefly discussed the types of things a blogger should consider when choosing a blogging platform, such as long-term goals and budgetary restraints. I’d like you to keep these things in mind as we go over the pros and cons of some of the most popular platforms out there:
Social Networking Sites: Sites such as MySpace allow users to host blogs that are accessible to others via their home pages. Users can use the default blogging template provided, or they can fiddle with the look of things, playing around with background color, alignment, font styles, and headers. If they’re a bit more tech-savvy, they can customize things even more, using the CSS (custom/cascading style sheets) window provided. In addition, they can subscribe to other blogs on the site, creative a circle of blog-love. Such a service is free — which is always a massive plus — but the audience is limited. A blog hosted on such a site would probably be friends- (or “friends”-; har de har har) only, and act as a means of keeping up-to-date with the lives of those you love deeply (obviously) but haven’t seen since high school graduation.
LiveJournal: Way back in the day, I started my very first blog on LiveJournal. At that time, all accounts were free. You can still register for a free account on LJ, but you’ll need to upgrade if you want to be able to have a greater number of userpics, choose from a greater number of pre-made designs, create polls, add voice posts, store and manage photos, etc. Domain forwarding is even available if you upgrade, and the costs are reasonable. In addition, LJ plays host to a (great) number of interest-based communities. Despite all of this, the site has remained a playground for primarily younger bloggers. It’s still a decent spot to consider if you’re planning a personal blog.
Blogger/Blogspot: The average age on Blogger skews slightly higher than that of the LJ blogger, but the milieu is very much the same. Once again, you can register a blog — or blogs — for free, and can even utilize domain forwarding in an advanced setup process (this is an important thing to consider if you’re planning a professional blog; it looks much better to readers if you have your own domain name, rather than a url with .blogger.com tagged on at the end). There are a small number of templates to choose from, as far as customization goes, and then you’re good to go! Once your basic blog is set up, you can always fool around with formatting a bit, even changing the template entirely if you have some decent HTML capabilities.
Movable Type: I haven’t had any personal experience with Movable Type, but I have heard it to be a definite step up in terms of professionalism. In fact, they tout themselves as “the world’s first professional blog publishing platform,” and actively market their service to at-home bloggers, corporations, nonprofits, etc. For free, solo bloggers can download the software required, which they then have to install onto the web server, arranging for their own domain name and host. (This seems like far too much work for me, but I’m pretty lazy.) Bloggers also have to pay for a license for the platform if there are to be multiple users with posting capabilities (for example, $295.95 for 5 users, and almost $1,000 for 20! I am far too poor for such delusions of grandeur).
Typepad: This is another platform I haven’t used personally, but it’s quite popular with the professionals (the professionals with money, perhaps?). Bloggers can try Typepad out for free — but only for 14 days. After that, prices go from $4.95 to $89.95 per month, or $49.50 to $899.50 per year, for multiple levels of blogging capability. It’s a good option to consider if your blog is to be a true business investment, as features include: a user-friendly blogging dashboard, highly customizable design, stats-tracking, search-engine optimization, ecommerce, podcasting capabilities, etc.
WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org: And finally, we arrive at the two WordPress platforms. I myself host both my self-help and my personal blog on Wordpress.com, and love how easy it is to use. I began by (easily) importing my LJ into the system, and have since kept it underneath the .wordpress.com url. When I eventually decided to start my more professional self-help blog (well, as professional as one with low levels of professionalism can manage), it was easy enough to figure out the domain forwarding process on my own. In addition to your basic blogging capabilities, WP.com is free (with just a small fee for domain mapping), and has a number of templates and widgets to choose from. There is an integrated stats program as well, in addition to tagging, spam protection, multi-author blogging, and more.
WordPress.org is another animal entirely (which I wasn’t quite clear on, until I read this), and provides even more flexibility. It is an open source, downloadable blogging software that must be installed onto a web server (so, while the software itself is free, the hosting is not; but this is the case any time you want to host a blog on your own domain). The upshot to WP.org is that you can upload new themes and plug-ins, and have complete control of back-end coding.
Whew! This got long, didn’t it? (I’m pooped.) Before you actually start things up on one of the platforms above, we should talk name decisions and hosting providers, but I think we should save that for next week. Until then…
