Which Blog Platform?

Here’s my quick overview of the most popular blog platforms out there;

the best…

#1: Wordpress.org Self Hosted Blogs:
Wordpress on your own webhosting account is the option I recommend. No problem with commercial content or any of the other limitations that other ‘free’ blogs have. Plus, there’s an abundance of free themes, widgets and plugins available to enhance the functionality of your blog.

Note: For hosting, I use and recommend this company. You can host one domain name for $4.95 or unlimited domains for $7.95. But the price isn’t why I recommend them. There’s lots of cheap hosts out there. The reliability and uptime are why I recommend them. Because if your server is down, you’re out of business.

and the rest…

Wordpress.com Hosted Blogs:
Wordpress.com offers hosted blogs, so you don’t need to set up hosting. I love wordpress blog platform, but I don’t like the wordpress.com hosted blogs simply because they don’t allow you to use any commercial content. No adsense. Nothing that sells anything. No money-making allowed. Great platform, but the “no commercial content” stipulation doesn’t work if your goal is to make an income blogging.

Typepad.com:
I tried Typepad simply because Seth Godin uses it. Human nature. We do stuff like that. Hated it. It does not have the flexibility that wordpress has. For $15/month, all you get is 1 GIG of space and 10 GIGs of bandwidth. $30/month will get you an upgrade to 2 GIGs of space. Woo hoo. Sorry, I can show you how to do far better than that.

The biggest drawback to typepad, though, is that Typepad users have no idea how much functionality they’re missing out on by not being able to use the zillions of widgets that are available to wordpress users.

Blogger.com:
Blogger.com lets you create commercial content. That’s about the only good thing I can find to say about blogger. And that it’s free - but so is wordpress. The templates aren’t great unless you know how to use html and CSS to create your own template.  The comment system leaves much to be desired. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been unable to leave a comment on a blogger blog because it wants an open ID and doesn’t recognize mine. Or wants a Google id.  And visually? Have you looked at the interface that your readers get to leave comments in?  Doesn’t exactly scream professional blogger.

Then there’s the wonderful opportunity for your readers to click ‘next blog’ in the masthead and leave your blog, maybe even landing at a blog with the kind of content you’d never send anyone to without blogger.com’s help. Ick. I didn’t think so, either.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Trackback URI | Comments RSS