Your blogging platform is the software you use to run your blog—it’s infrastructure. Before choosing a host for your blog, it’s important that you understand the software options available to you.
I have strong opinions about these options and so do other experts. For every opinion I offer, I’m confident you can find someone with a different view. I think you’ll find, though, that most marketing and business development experts share many of the views I’ll offer here. If you want to find alternative views to round our your thinking, the web can help you.
Blogging Platform Options
At the moment, there are essentially two options from which to choose.
Option 1: Developer-Hosted Blogs
With this option, the software developer hosts your blog. To get a blog, you sign up, usually for free, and can have a blog in about 10 minutes. The attraction to this approach is that there’s no software installation on your part, indeed, no need to do interact with the software at all beyond posting your articles and information. There’s no need to own your own domain, as your blog will be hosted on the developer’s domain.
But there’s a significant downside of this option, which takes me to:
Why I Don’t Recommend Blogger
I strongly discourage you from choosing Blogger, Google’s free, basic blogging platform, for your permanent business blog. Here’s why:
- In return for getting it free, Blogger puts a link at the top of your blog that allows visitors to look at other people’s blogs. Why would you want a visitor to go to someone else’s blog instead of visiting your site thoroughly?
- Blogger has limited themes for personalizing your blog’s format, colors and layout. The result is that there are a lot of blogs out there that will look just like yours. This detracts from your branding efforts substantially. This may not matter for a personal blog, but it matters for a business blog.
- Blogger has limited features for adding extras to your site. So, you won’t be able to take advantage of some of the powerful add-on features, sometimes called plugins, that make your site more interactive and successful.
- You’ll outgrow it if you stick with blogging as a marketing strategy. If you’re serious about blogging as part of your marketing strategy, I recommend you select blogging software that’s as serious as you are.
- As audiences grow more sophisticated, they may (and probably already are) begin to differentiate between professional, self-hosted blogs and free sites like Blogger.
Other Developer-Hosted Options
If owning your own domain is unimportant to you, yet you want more than the basic Blogger option offers, then you can choose a developer-hosted option such as the well respected WordPress.com or TypePad.
With these options, you can have free or low-cost blogs with addresses such as www.HotShotMediator.typepad.com or www.wordpress.com/HotShotMediator. There’s no software to install and you can have a blog in just a few minutes. Both Wordpress.com and TypePad offer more feature-rich blogs than Blogger, as well as numerous templates for layout and design.
WordPress.com offers a for-fee upgrade that allows you (or someone with technical savvy) to edit the file that controls the blog’s appearance. TypePad’s basic monthly package is similar.
Option 2: User-Hosted Blogs
User-hosted blogs, also called stand-alone blogs, are blogs you have hosted on your own domain name. The software is installed on your web host’s servers and you administer your blog from there.
I’m a strong proponent of user-hosted blogs for business and it’s the option I recommend to you. Because a user-hosted blog lives on your own domain, you have more control over your its appearance and features, a big plus for the business user trying to convey a unique and professional image and brand.
And if you choose your web host carefully, the software installation can be almost as simple for you as setting up a free Blogger account, because many of the more service-oriented hosts will install the software for you, at no additional charge, now or in the future.
There are numerous user-hosted blogging platforms from which to choose, with TypePad’s advanced packages and WordPress.org’s (not the same as WordPress.com) packages among the most popular. There are passionate TypePad devotees and passionate WordPress devotees. After using both, I’m the latter.
I could write a whole chapter to compare the two, but I don’t want to spend your or my time that way. I’ll leave it at this: WordPress’s advanced features don’t require significant tech savvy, you can have and use a WordPress blog without any tech savvy at all, and because WordPress uses plugins, little pieces of software that add functionality with relative ease (depending, of course, on the plugin), the power of WordPress is almost unlimited.
You, of course, will choose for yourself, and visits to both platforms’ sites may be a good investment of your time if you’re a careful and methodical comparison shopper. Because I recommend WordPress and know it well, my examples and recommendations in the rest of this chapter will be based on WordPress.
Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
