Choice of blogging platform | Software
There are many blogging platform that you can joined for free. Each platform offers different features and capabilities. One thing in common among the blogging platform is that it provide free access and user friendly functionality.
Being a normal person without Information Technology (IT) background, those blogging platform allow you to create a blog and post your articles. You don't have to know how to create code or script for the site. What is important is that you have ideas, good writing skills and a little bit of skill in surfing the Internet.
UPDATES:
* Apr 22, 2009 - WordPress vs Blogger BlogSpot - Whose the Best
For the moment, ignore what is HTML, CSS, Flash and other technical stuffs. Focus on your topics or article contents. Surf to other blogger's blog and see how they maintained their blog with new updates or new posts. Learn their writing style and how they presented or formatted their posts.
Now, let's get back to the subject of this post, i.e, Choice of blogging platform. A common blogging platform that your will noticed a lot are: Blogger (or BlogSpot), WordPress and TypePad.
BlogSpot.com | Blogger.com
BlogTactic (http://www.blogtactic.com) is powered by BlogSpot.com. I prefer to use BlogSpot.com platform for most of my other blogs because BlogSpot is owned by the mighty Google. With BlogSpot.com, your blog can be indexed by Google much faster and free. Being indexed by Google means, you blog is registered in Google search page and when other surfers search for some information, Google will also scan your blog if that information is posted in your blog.
WordPress.com
WordPress.com is mostly preferred by experienced bloggers who have been very familiar with blogging techniques and master a certain level of web programming. This is because, WordPress.com offers a better or nicer blog template. To most surfers, WordPress is more professional looking.
But to me, a professional looking blog is secondary. I am more concerned on the information that I will post on my blog. To me, contents is king. Google will bring traffic or visitors to your blog if you have the required information. There is no point publishing a professional looking blog if your blog have no useful information or too scattered with craps.
In addition, WordPress.com offers two accounts, i.e, free account and paid account. Free account WordPress does not allow you to install your advertisement script on your WordPress Blog. In fact, installing some plugin script to your blog can also be a nightmare if you use WordPress.
TypePad.com
TypePad.com is similar to WordPress.com and is not free.
Squidoo.com
Squidoo is the world's most popular site for building free, single pages (called LENS) about your passions. Highlight books, blogs, vids, online shops, or just spread the word about stuff you love. Bonus: you raise money (for you or charity) at the same time.
Each lens is one person's look at something online. Your take on football or business or the best thai food in town.
Lenses are free to set up.
Lenses are easy and totally non-techy.
Lenses pay a royalty to hundreds of great charities. (Or straight to you! Lots of lensmasters earn hundreds or thousands of dollars a year).
Lenses get you credibility and traffic... and lenses only take a few minutes to build
Conclusion
TypePad.com offers paid services. WordPress is a professional looking blog but not suitable if you opts for free account and intend to monetize (earning extra income from) your blog.
So the simplest and practical choice for a blogging platform is therefore BlogSpot.com | Blogger.com which can get your blog to be noticed by Google earlier and allow you to monetize your blog.
Ofcourse if you have budget, you may forget about the mentioned free blogging platforms and buy a domain and host the blog yourself.
2 comments:
pertamaxxxxxxxx,.....
i think bloger is the best, it's so easy and friendly.
and they still grow,..
i use blogger,too
Thanks!
For me, who's not a techie, I think Typepad is the best. The reason why they charge because they make everything easy for you that no other blog hosts like Wordpress can do. Yes I recognize Wordpress is free and the best for most bloggers. But for some certain people like me who wants to submit my sitemap to Google, pinging directly to search engines, etc. which I don't really know how to install, they did it for me. I think it all depends on the needs of an individual blogger. I tried to make a blog on Wordpress but I gave up on it because I don't know much about sitemap, linkbacks, etc, and I can't get it from the help section although they have instructions to do it---but still I don't want to be hassled about technical stuff. All I want is to blog and post good content.
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