Once in a while I get this question:
"If you were to start blogging today, which blogging platform, software and/or hosting service would you use?"
The answer isn't necessarily straightforward. In general, it depends on:
- Which features are most important to you as a blogger;
- How design-savvy and how tech-savvy you are, and how much you want to tweak by yourself.
I drew up an Excel sheet to compare some of the blogging services that I've used, on some of the criteria that I personally find most relevant.
The solutions in the comparison are:
- Vox, SixApart's third-party branded, community blogging service that allows you to publish different content to different groups of people: public, friends, family, and just yourself.
- Blogger, the inventors of blogging, now part of Google.
- Blogsome, a hosted service running on WordPress, an open source blogging platform.
- WordPress, open source blogging platform which you can download and run on your own or hosted server.
- Moveable Type, by SixApart, blogging solution which you can download and run on your own or hosted server.
- Three service levels of Typepad, by SixApart.
The criteria for comparison which I looked at are:
- Branding
- domain mapping
- third-party branding
- Access control
- distributed access
- multiple authors
- Design
- easy layout templates and customization
- advanced, CSS editing
- Features
- easy-to-use backend interface
- moblogging
- widgets
- Application control
- running the blogging solution on you own or hosted server
- Pricing
In some cases, where I haven't got the latest information about specific features, I have insert a question mark ("?"). I'd love to receive feedback and will be happy to turn those question marks into plusses ("+") or minuses ("-"). Please do correct me if I'm wrong about any of the inserted values.
Sometimes it's easy to choose
By way of illustration, I think there are a few "easy" use cases (or ways to narrow down your selection):
a) If you are rather tech-savvy, i.e. if you know how to install and maintain software on your own or hosted server, you can probably narrow down your selection to WordPress and Moveable Type (- or even Blogsome in case you don't care about domain mapping). If you're not tech-savvy, you can count WordPress and Moveable Type out.
b) If domain mapping is important to you, and you don't have the technical skill to run blogging software on your own or hosted server, you should probably consider TypePad Plus.
c) If you want advanced control over your blog's design (and you don't want to run your own server), you should probably consider Blogsome (without domain mapping) or TypePad Pro (with domain mapping).
d) If you don't mind third-party branding, you don't care too much about domain mapping, and you are looking to share different blog content with different groups of people (i.e. public, friends, family, or just yourself) in an online community setup, have a look at Vox.
e) If you don't care too much about domain mapping, and you are looking for a free blogging service, try Blogger or Blogsome. Both are very straightforward and user friendly. Blogsome has a slightly richer feature set, including multiple authors and different access levels.
f) One reason to use TypePad basic, which is a paid service, rather than Blogger or Blogsome, is TypePad's customer service: the help ticketing system inside the blogging platform can be very useful.
Do you agree with my assessment? Can you help me fill in the gaps? Let me know!
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