Blogging Platforms - Which One To Choose?
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I could give a normal review of blogging platforms, looking at each of the popular ones in turn with the pros and cons of each, but I’m not going to (whoa that was a short post)!
So what is the difference between, hosted and non hosted?
Instead I’m going to tell you about my experiences of blogging platforms, and I have had two, Blogger - hosted and Wordpress - non hosted. I’m hoping that this will be more helpful and personal than just a straight review that you can find anywhere.
There is always a hot debate and difference of opinion about blogging platforms and which are the best, and it’s generally between hosted and non hosted blogging platforms. You can change you’re mind and swap blogging platforms, but if you’re blog has grown well, you may find that search engine rankings are effected by the move, so make sure you are happy with the one you have chosen. At the end of the day though it’s whatever you are comfortable with, because it’s you that will be having to use it day in day out. Here are my two experiences:
Blogger
When I started blogging I knew nothing about the different platforms on offer, and I just went with the easiest to find and join which for me was Blogger. Blogger is owned by Google, and was obviously my first experience of blogging platforms. I found it very easy to set up an account with them and start my first blog, it literally took me 15 mins to set my first blog up. With Blogger they host your blog for you and give you a domain name all for free. During set up I had to pick a domain name, one that isn’t already in use on the blogger network because you have the extension blogspot.com at the end of your domain. So I had ‘createblogs-mandy.blogspot.com’ as my domain because ‘create blogs’ was already taken, not ideal looking back but at the time I had no idea how anything worked so it seemed fine to me.
Now the major thing I think to consider when thinking about hosted platforms, is that they have the power to shut your blog down at any time for whatever reason they like, your blog is on their servers and your domain is an extension of theirs, so if they think you aren’t playing by their rules they can just switch you off and you could lose everything.
I did have a good experience with Blogger it was very easy to post to and add things to my blog and use the dashboard. So it’s a good training ground for new bloggers, to play around and see what blogging is like and more importantly whether you like it, before you commit to have to pay for hosting. It was a great tool for doing that in the early days of my blogging, I learned a lot and found that I really enjoyed blogging and was hooked. But as my experience grew I started to want to make changes to my blog. I wanted to add more pages to my blog so I could add information about myself and contact details. Also I wanted to add categories to make searching for a specific type of article easier. And the themes, Blogger only has about a dozen to choose from so a lot of Blogger blogs can have the same theme as you have, and you can’t modify them easily. I was looking for more expandability and functionality for my blog to take it to the next stage, and that was when I heard about Wordpress.
Wordpress.org
Be careful because there is a difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. Wordpress.com is the same as Blogger and is hosted for you and only gives limited Wordpress functionality. Whereas Wordpress.org is the full application, it is open source software which means it is written and maintained by a group of volunteer programmers that do it for the love of doing it! You have to install it on a hosting account that you have arranged and pay for.
Wordpress.org caught my eye because it has so many themes and plug ins (many free) that let you really personalise your blog and also gives you great flexibility to get your blog running and looking how you want it to. The other major difference I suppose is that you have to pay more out with Wordpress because of the hosting and domain registration, while Blogger is free. I chose hosting that had a one click Wordpress installation process as I have never used hosting companies before. Also I had to register and pay for a domain name (but it is mine now). The other good thing was I could easily import all the information from my Blogger blog into Wordpress and it looks as if it has always been there.
These are the two experiences I have had with blogging platforms and how I have found them so far, and this blog is ran on Wordpress.org (which I am very happy with) and actually used to be createblogs-mandy.blogspot.com. What do you think of the changes?
Mandy
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