There are many different blog publishers that offer free basic blogs and all of them have slightly different features. Choosing a blog publisher that has all the features you need can be difficult and time consuming. This article is designed to make that process a little bit easier for you.
Before choosing a blog publishing application, here are a few things to consider:
- Ease of use – you want a blog publishing application that is straight forward.
- The purpose of your blog – what features will you need?
- Are you planning on monetizing your blog? If so, you need a platform that will allow for advertising.
- Do you want the ability to make individual posts private or password protected?
- Will you be featuring a large amount of photos or other media?
- If you want a personalized domain name, choose a blog publishing application that allows mapping with domain names.
- What aesthetic are you looking for? Different blogging applications have varied ‘skins’ to choose from. Some are more customizable than others.
The Pros and Cons of the Top Four Blog Publishing Applications
The following free blog publishing applications are ranked in order of ease of use. As a newbie to the blogosphere, it’s best to start with software that will be easy to operate.
- Blogger is a Google owned blogging application. It takes just a few minutes to create a blogger account and the interface is simple for the novice to navigate. But with a simple interface, you get simple features so if you’re looking to expand your blog and add a lot of plugins, this probably isn’t the best choice. Further, Blogger has limited media space (only 1 MB).
- WordPress is a little more advanced than Blogger, which means the user interface can be more difficult to figure out. A WordPress blog is easy to open, but more difficult to customize because there are so many options. WordPress does allow the user to choose privacy options per post rather than per blog. However, unlike Blogger, you must pay for an upgraded service to map a domain name to your blog.
- Movable Type is a more complex blog publishing application. To use Movable Type, you first must download software onto your computer, which can be difficult and it takes up space on your hard drive. Movable Type allows the blogger to post future blog entries on a schedule, and it also allows the user to edit several blogs/templates at the same time. While these advanced features might be nice, Movable Type is created for people who have some knowledge of code and blogging.
- GreyMatter is, like Movable Type, a server-side blogging service. This software requires a download before you can begin blogging, and it requires some coding experience. GreyMatter was one of the original weblog services, and provides many features that other blogs publishing applications don’t provide. Because Greymatter is no longer in active development, it is not a promising choice for a blogging application.
Whatever your decision, have fun! What blogging platform have you chosen?
