When you’re getting ready to start your own blog, there are a lot of questions to answer and plans to be made. One of the most important decisions you’ll make is which blogging site to use for your blog. Everyone has his or her favorite, so you’ll hear a different opinion from everyone you meet.

Mine is WordPress, like the blog you see here.

But you need to find the blogging site that will work best for you and best suit your needs. Let’s look at some of the most popular blogging sites available today and check out their pros and cons.

Blogger – Blogger is a Google product, which makes it very popular by association. Blogger does have some good points to it, and one of them is that it is part of the Google community of products and as such is very stable.

It works well with a number of free Google products that lend themselves well to blogging such as Feedburner and Google Analytics (this monitors your site stats). Blogger is also quite simple to use with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface, so it’s great for someone with little or no experience. Blogger also provides free domain hosting, and because it’s a Google product, it’s got a good strong server infrastructure to support it. Blogger is free to use.

As far as the cons of using Blogger, it can be nearly impossible to move your content off Blogger if you decide you want to change to another blogging platform. Blogger also lacks some of the extra features that other services like WordPress does, such as a large and growing theme developing community that provides thousands of open source themes to use, plugins and trackback capability. Some people have reported that they woke up one day and their Blogger blog had disappeared – it was deleted – and you have no control over that.

WordPress – WordPress is an extremely popular blogging platform for several reasons. For one, it’s very flexible – you can even change the HTML on your pages if you know how. WordPress is very easy to install and set up and offers a huge number of themes, widgets and plugins that are easy to put together for a nice blog. You don’t need to know HTML – writing posts and managing your blog is done in WYSIWYG format. There is also a healthy support forum that is very active. Like Blogger, WordPress is free to use.

WordPress cons include the fact that even though it’s easy to install and use, there’s still a learning curve. If you’re not a “techie,” like me, you can still learn to use and love WordPress but it might take a little time – unless you use a step-by-step simple WordPress Guide like I did. Also, the availability of so many plugins makes it tempting to use lots of them. But they take up a lot of server resources and this could lead to a slow moving website, which you don’t want.

TypePad – TypePad is a blogging site that offers a very easy to use interface. It’s easy to set up and navigate, plus you have the ability to add scripts for embedding widgets. You can also easily include AdSense and other types of ads.

This is nice for a blog that you intend to use for making money. For more advanced users, TypePad gives the ability to customize themes or build a theme from scratch. For those who don’t want to build their own, there’s a wide selection available.

The biggest con of using TypePad is that it costs money. The basic account is $4.95 a month, where the other two platforms are free for basically the same thing. If you want extra bells and whistles, the cost goes up.

Each of the highlighted blogging sites listed here has their own advantages and disadvantages, and each has their own fan base. Before you get started blogging, take time to decide which platform will work best for you not only now, but also in the long run.

If you use Hostgator as your hosting service, you can easily install a blog on your domain. Just click the Fantastico De Luxe button (the little smiley face) and follow the directions – it does the work for you! Then you just pick a theme and start blogging.

Tiff

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