blogging crew

I am often asked which is the best blogging platform?

This article is written on the basis of you being a new blogger, and I would certainly welcome any established bloggers reading the post to share their experience and knowledge with different platforms in the comment box below.

What is the purpose of your blog? Business, fun, hobby, news? Are you intending to blog long-term? Do you want to make money from it?

Free Options

As you would expect of a free service flexibility is a little restricted. The choice of themes and widget-functionality is limited (though more and more designers are modifying themes from other platforms to use on free service blogs) and you get a clumsy-looking domain by default, such as yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.wordpress.com. I started off with Blogger, moved on to WordPress.com before settling on WordPress.org (self-hosted service).

Paid-For Services

In addition to the choice of themes, Wordpress has a plethora of plug-ins and widgets available to add functionality to your blog, enhancing your readers’ experience when visiting your site… or frightening them off if you over-do it!

Although WordPress itself is free, you will have to pay for independently hosting your blog. This will only cost you a few pounds per month and there are hundreds of suitable companies out there, though please beware not all hosting companies will host a WordPress blog. If you are based in the UK I recommend using UKHost4u where a WordPress blog can be hosted for only £3.99 per month and up to 4 blogs for just £5.99!

There are several other blogging platforms available, some free and some paid-for, including Movable Type, TypePad, Joomla, B2Evolution and Drupal to name just a few. All of them have advantages and disadvantages, though with the exception of Joomla (which I struggled with) I have no experience of using them. As I mentioned earlier I am a WordPress fan and comments from experienced bloggers using other platforms would be really appreciated. There is a huge choice of excellent off-the-shelf themes (at the time of writing 678 ‘official’ themes available to download directly from WordPress) and a quick Google search using the term “free Wordpress templates” will literally reveal thousands from various sources. Consequently, you can get an excellent-looking blog up and running using a free theme. However, if you want some degree of exclusivity, “premium” themes are readily available too.You can pay as little as a few pounds right up to the-sky’s-the-limit if you want something completely exclusive to you.

If you are going to be an occasional blogger or you’re writing purely for fun, one of the free blogging platforms such as WordPress.com or Blogger.com should meet your needs. The same applies if you are unsure about blogging long-term. A free option is ideal if you want to ‘dabble’ before becoming a serious blogger. Likewise if you’re not tech savvy, as you don’t have to mess around with any coding, and with this type of platform you don’t need to worry about hosting. You write, click a button and your blog post is live on the internet.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a definitive answer and I would always suggest the “best” depends on what you are looking to achieve from your blog.