Blogging 101 – Tips to Start Your Own Blog
Presenting an Overview of Free Blogs vs Paid Options
Oct 18, 2009
Blogging is the latest gig that has revolutionized the art of journalism. Every person who thinks and has something to share about is keen to start a blog. This post is aimed to help potential bloggers understand the intricacies of blogging in terms of things that make up a blog.
Blogging Options
One thing that the present world presents in plenty on the World Wide Web is options. In hosting a blog, there are several free hosts and an equal number of paid ones as well.
Free ones include names such as Blogger, Live Journal amongst other players. They basically provide a blog with basic features which allows the user to post content, change the look and feel and some also permit posting advertisements.
Paid options mostly include purchasing a domain name and a hosting option to go along with and installing a Content Management System (CMS) as an interface. Self hosted blogs provide a wide array of options that include customizing the look and feel to one’s satisfaction, adding extensions, inserting ads and basically doing anything and everything that is humanly possible.
One of the popular blogging engines used in paid type is Wordpress. It is the most popular CMS amongst bloggers worldwide. It carries a tag line called ‘code is poetry’ and rightly so, the system is uncomplicated, thereby inviting developers worldwide to build templates and plugins to extend the functionality of the CMS.
Go for a Self Hosted Blogging Platform
Although free blogging engines lure potential bloggers with the obvious keyword – free – it is restrictive in nature and more importantly, online readers don’t generally respect those bloggers who don’t have their own domain and self hosted blogs.
One can start blogging within the hour after settling all the dues with the domain registrar and a web host. Most web hosts offer to install CMS’ for free which is an incentive in itself for starters and non-technical bloggers.
There are a plenty of others CMSs available online. To name a few – Joomla, ModX, Drupal and the list goes on and on. Wordpress beats each and every one of the other platforms by a good distance owing to simple code mechanics that has in-turn translated into humongous following, especially developers and designers who are instrumental in extending wordpress by creating plugins and templates.
To Conclude
Stay away from free blogs, they are not worth anybody’s time. Go for a self hosted Wordpress blog. There are thousands of free templates to choose from, built for every category of blogs. Extend Wordpress with plugins, which also count in thousands. Do leave a comment if there are questions on any aspects of setting up a blog.
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