You’ve rolled up your sleeves and you’re ready to start a blog. You’ve picked your topic — say, portraits made out of food — and you chose a blog name (FoodFace?) You’re ready to type away.
But wait, you need a place to blog, don’t you? That’s what this post is about: Good, free blog software.
In the world of free blogging software (aka “blogging engines” - vrooom!), two stand above the rest: Blogger and Wordpress. Both are “hosted,” which means you just visit a Web page to blog instead of having to downloading and install anything.
Blogger
Blogger is owned by Google, and you can tell a lot about Blogger by its home page: it’s simple, clear, and friendly.
Signing up is easy — in fact, everything about Blogger is easy. Blogger gives you basic options to customize the look of your blog by picking from some 16 templates, and you can rearrange the basic elements like your archive links around your page.
If you want to see what Blogger blogs look like in action, go to Blogger.com and click on some of the recently updated blogs and those “of note” at the top of the page — this gives a good idea of what you get.
Wordpress
Like Blogger, Wordpress is free and hosted. When you visit the Wordpress home page, you can see that there’s more going on here; and that’s because there’s more going on with Wordpress. This software gives you many more options for customizing, including pages and pages of design templates to choose from.
It also comes with a host of useful add-ons and features like a spam blocker for your comments, easy-to-place tag clouds, search boxes and the like, and notification when other Wordpress blogs link to your posts.
Note that Wordpress also offers a downloadable version of its software. The free blogging engine lives at Wordpress.com while the software lives at Wordpress.org. If you’re like me, you will type the wrong one many, many times in the course of your blogging life.
How To Choose?
Both of these tools are state-of-the-art and include functions like RSS feeds and what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editing.
My first recommendation is to look at blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress and see which has a design “feel” that you like (be sure to look at several from each).
Next: do you want simplicity over all (Blogger)? Or do you think you’ll want to fiddle and tweak and have room to grow (Wordpress?)
If you still can’t decide, you can always start with Blogger and then at some later date suck your whole Blogger blog into Wordpress (a nice feature indeed).
If you have opinions about these, or other, blogging tools, please leave your thoughts in the comments!
Happy blogging…
Blogger is junk… Wordpress isn’t complicated to use at all, and you don’t want to be switching back and forth between platforms becuase then your permalink structure will change, you’ll lose all your backlinks, and all the growth you’ve made will then end up down teh tubes, because you’ll be starting over. You will lose your pagerank if you switch, and you will lose your position in the SERPS.
Wordpress isn’t hard to use at all. All you need to know how to do to make it work is get into your admin area, click on write, type your post, and click publish… i hope no one will end up misguided by this post.
Good points, Nick — you do lose a lot when you switch platforms, so best to pick one and stick with it. Also true that Wordpress is easy to use (though Blogger is a little simpler).
Blogger is easier to use, while Wordpress is for people who are a bit more familiar with html.
Though I also have a Wordpress blog, I prefer Blogger.
Great post! I blog on all of the different platforms and I like Blogger the best because it’s so quick and easy, I also really love TypePad (it’s cheap but not free), it has a lot to offer. Blogger and TypePad are great for those bloggers who aren’t that technically inclined.
Tim, I wanted to draw your attention to the latest addition to the range of free blog hosting services - Profy (and Profy blog is actually one of proud BlogBurst publishers).
Profy takes simplicity from Blogger, adds more flexibility and better options for customization and it actually allows bloggers to monetize their blogs by displaying ads from any advertising networks of their choice (as we have no limitations for that). We built Profy to actually make blogging more flexible and more comprehensive a process than it currently is and to help bloggers avoid as much hassle as possible and actually focus on creative side of blogging.
I’d really love to have you give Profy a test run and maybe share it with BurstBlog publishers here - and hopefully one day I will see many Profy blogs among BlogBurst publishers as well.
I’m good with Blogger, though i think a couple of features like a calendar with a planner should be included. I think Wordpress has one, & that is one of the things I miss. Otherwise, maybe it’s more often what you are used to, & therefore more comfortable with. Blogger also doesnt have 3 column ready options & I am terrified of losing my blog if I play around too much. Done it once, & almost passed out!! But I like blogger;in time would look forward to what you are talking about-Profy. :0)
thanks nice software
i want to try Profy!
Good information. Why is Blogger junk? I think it is very easy.