Blogging 101

Interested in starting a blog to tell the world about your work or hobbies or anything you are extremely passionate about? In this article I will run through a summary of some of the options, from the cheapest and simplest, to the more advanced and costly. Each of these has their own advantages and disadvantages and the choice really depends on where you want to go.

One of the quickest and easiest places to start is at Blogger. This service, which was purchased by Google back in 2003, provides a free and simple method to get your blog up and running quickly. If you already have a google account you will simply use that to login to the site. Next you will choose your free *.blogspot.com sub-domain name, pick a theme, and start writing your thoughts for the world to consume.

Once you start to learn your way around a little bit more, you can delve into some of the more advanced options. Multiple pages can be created, ads added to your site and you can add custom html and graphics. This site also provides some great details on the statistics of visitors to your blog.

Another popular and free to start blog site is wix.com. They provide hundreds of free templates and themes that make setting up your blog simple and fun. Wix will also provide help with optimizing your site for search engines and posting to social media. From their basic plan you can grow to more advanced plans as your blog and audience grow. These plans do cost money, but may have features you want or need as you grow into them.

Starting at a free site is great, but once things start growing you may want to consider moving to a paid offering. One of these options is Squarespace.com. Their personal tier service starts at about $12/month. In addition to the features of the free services, they also provide unlimited storage, bandwidth and pages. This personal tier also provides a free custom domain and ssl certificate. The ssl certificate adds encryption to your website.

WordPress is another great place to start your blog. You can host the site at WordPress or pick an alternate hosting provider such as HostGator, BlueHost or GoDaddy.com. These hosting providers all offer you various tiers of paid plans providing full and simple wordpress setup plus the ability to create your own domain.

WordPress is definitely a bit more complicated to get started with and has much more of a learning curve than the other choices. The benefits, though, far outweigh these complexities. With many more themes and plugins than others, you can make your site do anything you could possibly need it to do. You can start with a simple blog and grow it into an online magazine or e-commerce site. Seemingly endless combinations of features, themes and plugins may seem overwhelming at first. Keep working at it though, and you will soon find yourself getting comfortable with the platform.

Of all of the choices I have listed, WordPress will definitely have you starting off spending more time designing your site, rather than posting blog entries to it. So if you just want to start writing then pick one of the first options. If you are into the more aesthetic and advanced abilities of a platform then WordPress is the way to go.

Whatever you choose, if you have a passion that you want to share with the world, blogging is a great way to express those thoughts and ideas.