BTZ's insider's guide to Blogging - Part 3

Which platform should I use?

With the tools available you could set up your new blog and be operational within 10 minutes of reading this post.  It wouldn't need to cost you a penny, and there won't be any adverts on your site - unless you want to sell something!  Even if you decide to go for one of the premium service options, we are talking a few pounds, euros, dollars a month.  The technology is easy to set up, the online editors for your content work well, and it's reasonably straightforward to syndicate your content to the world with RSS.  For the small or medium business, this is a low cost, low risk exercise to add the concept to your marketing mix, and to start having an online conversation with your market and customers. 

There are perfectly acceptable free services available like Blogger (owned by Google) or WordPress.com.  These are a good place to start.  Blogger gives you all of the basic features you'll need, gives you a fair choice of template styles and allows you access to the template code itself.  This means that with a little care and very modest knowledge of HTML you can customise your site's look and feel, to add links, add feeds, add skype buttons, add almost anything.  Most of the useful utilities you can subscribe to provide you with the HTML to copy, and guidance on where to paste it in the template.  WordPress.com gives you a good range of styles and templates, and is nicely configurable, but does not allow access to the template.  So you are restricted in terms of look and feel and placing extra features and plug-ins, but it does have the concept of pages, as well as posts.  You can set up as many pages in a hierarchy as you need, just like a Content Management System.  This makes it easy for you to describe your business in as much detail as you need, alongside your regular blog posts.  Either of these will work well. 

The next level up is a product like TypePad, from Six Apart.  Their pricing is from $5 to $15 a month, depending on how many blogs and authors you want to be involved, or to get extra features like photo albums.  This offers a good range of features, templates and configuration, as well as access to the templates to add in those extra goodies.

The next option is to download blogging software yourself, so that you can take control of the templates and style and get the look and feel you really want.  You could choose a commercial option like Moveable Type (MT), which is actually the software used by the TypePad service, or an open source (free) offering like WordPress.org (WP), which is the software used by WordPress.com.   MT's pricing starts at $70 for a basic personal option, right up to $1,300 for a commercial licence for 50 users.  WordPress just costs you the time and effort to download and install it.  In both cases you'll need to budget for hosting the software.  However, there are options for either WP or MT with Yahoo! Small Business, where you can rent appropriate server space with the capacity and bandwidth you need, and have either product installed and kept up to date for you. 

Here is a good blog software comparison chart, (UPDATE: please note, Dennis Howlett tells me most of the no's for WP on this chart can actually be done with available plug-ins) and the accompanying article by Susannah Gardner which asks "Are you using the right blogging tool?".  MT and WP are discussed in some detail by Vinnie Garcia in "Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed".

A recent poll of about a 1000 readers of problogger showed the following spread of platforms - 37% Wordpress.org, 22% Blogger, 8% Movable Type, 4% Expression Engine, 3.5% TypePad, 3% Wordpress.com and 49 different platforms in the survey.

There seems to be a phenomenon that bloggers start with something simple like Blogger or TypePad, but then after 3 to 6 months they feel the restrictions, and move up to something better.  Stuart Jones recently moved his BusinessMatters blog from Blogger to TypePad.  Dennis Howlett started on TypePad, but recently moved his AccMan Pro blog to WP.  I'm about to move BTZ from Blogger to WP.  The good news is that migration appears to be straightforward, with guidance available from platform to platform.  Both Stuart and Dennis have good experiences in their transition, and that seems to be the norm.  I hope so, but I'll tell you more on that once I've lived through it.

These products make it very easy for any business to get a web presence.  I've noticed a number of companies recently setting up a blog site, and not bothering with a traditional website, for example GlobalBrain.  Last night on the drive home I thought about my own accountant, who has an embarrassing holding page for her website, awaiting her technically minded husband to find time to finish the job.  While I was thinking about this article it occurred to me that she could set up a WordPress.com account, start a blog, but use the tabs and pages to get some web presence explaining what she does.  She had set something up within 30 minutes of my call.  I won't point you to it until she's got some sensible content written, but it shows the power and ease of this medium.

The next in the series is Part 4 , which give you some ideas on how to start, things you must do to help make your site a success, mistakes to avoid, and some important words on the topic of Search Engine Optimization.  If you missed them, here is where you find Part 1 and Part 2. 

Technorati Tags : Blogging, marketing, RSS, Blogger, WordPress, Google, TypePad, SixApart, MovableType, Yahoo!, BusinessMatters, AccManPro, GlobalBrain

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