Starting Off Right: How to Find the Best Blogging Platform For You
The blogosphere can be a pretty overwhelming place. As a new blogger, or someone deciding to commit more time and effort to your blog, you have many choices to make. One of the first and most important is which platform to use. In order to make the best decision, you need to consider your goals and priorities, because different platforms are geared towards different types of blogs.
If you want to post multimedia content, with easy uploading and a user-friendly interface, check out Tumblr. This is a great platform for quote lovers and photographers. In addition to traditional text, photo, and video entry options, you can also add quotes, links, chats, and audio to your page. Posts are generally short, and many people enjoy posting often. A popular feature on Tumblr is reblogging. Each post has the option to reblog, so if you see something on someone else’s page that you like, you can just click the button to put it on your page as well. Tumblr even takes care of attribution for you, including a link to the person who originally posted the reblogged content.
Although pretty much all of the platforms allow mobile and e-mail posting, Posterous strongly encourages both methods. In fact, their tagline is: “posterous is the dead simple place to post everything. Just email us.” They accept a variety of different files as attachments to your e-mailed post, and take care of formatting and posting them for you. This is a very simple and user-friendly option.
There is an ongoing debate among bloggers as to which is better: WordPress or Blogger. Again, it depends on what you want out of a platform, so there’s no “right answer.”
WordPress has an easy to navigate set up. Everything you need is accessible from your dashboard. They also have a great statistics system built in, and they offer various import options for those who are making the switch from another platform. Comments are easy to track and reply to, and they offer a number of sidebar widgets that integrate content from other social media sites. Although they have a library of themes, you’ll have to pay to edit the CSS if you ever want to customize them.
Accessing Blogger’s features requires an extra step. From the dashboard, there are links to create a new post, edit posts, settings, layout, and monetize. Once you’re redirected to these sections, navigation is pretty intuitive. The creative side of Blogger is more flexible than WordPress. There are countless themes available across the Web, and you have the option of editing your template’s HTML at any point. The Page Elements page is great for those who are more visual. You can drag and drop various widgets and (fittingly) page elements as you arrange them on your page. Blogger has a lot more options for sidebar widgets, but finding the good ones that work well can be a challenge.
This analysis only scratches the surface of the pros and cons of these platforms. Once you figure out what kind of platform you’re looking for, it’s smart to do some research of your own. The good news is that if you can’t decide, you can always try out more than one at once.
You Might Also Enjoy Reading:
