The Right Tool for the Blogging Job

Blogs are taking over the web, and with good reason. But these blogging tools are too blogging complicated and too blogging expensive for small sites and individuals to put a professional blog online. Right? Wrong! There are world-class options available to fit any circumstance, even a budget of zero blogging dollars.

A blog is a powerful tool that organizations and individuals can use to connect with their web users, attract new ones, and keep them all coming back regularly.  In many cases, blogs replace the classic news/announcement/update/event pages of yesterday’s sites, and become their author’s primary means of communication with their users. To be effective, a blog must be kept current (since a stale web site creates the impression of a stale organization), and it must be relevant. You have to post things your users want to read.

If you can do that, then a blog would likely serve you very well. It’s just a matter of choosing which tool is the right one for your particular job.

There are two basic flavors of blogs. We’ll call them hosted and installed.

Installed Blogs / Content Management Systems

An installed blog consists of a set of scripts installed on your web server, which are usually connected to a database, also on your server. In most cases, their included tool set is powerful and broad enough that they’re considered full content management systems.  Packages such as Expression Engine, Joomla, WordPress, Moveable Type, and others allow your site to be built with your own design and front-end code, and they let you fully customize their powers, look, and behavior. They usually come with an assortment of features and plug-in modules, and their configuration is limited only by your imagination. However, the downside is that they require significant expertise and time to set up properly, place specific technology requirements on your web server, and they may not as easy to use as you imagine.

All of this can become a significant obstacle to those working with minimal resources, and make this solution the wrong one for many small web sites.

Hosted Blogs

Hosted blogs are complete blogging systems that are offered as a service on a third party web site.  Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress.com (a hosted version of WordPress itself) are good examples of these types of services. Your blog and your administration tools are hosted and presented by your provider on their site, running on their server. As a result, these blogs are very easy to create. You go to the site, sign up, write your blog, and bingo, you’re online. But, frequently the drawback is that you’re online at their web address (though it usually contains some customization based on the name of your blog).

The other commonly considered drawback of hosted blogs is that you end up dealing with a limited set of blogging / content management tools, which cannot be easily customized (if at all). But this varies from service to service, and it’s a pretty subjective point. If your blogging needs are minimal, then you’re not likely to notice many of the limitations. You may never feel limited at all.

When looking at your options, it becomes a question of cost vs. benefit. If you have the resources, and could benefit from the power of a content management system, then the installed option may indeed be for you. But I work with a number of organizations and individuals who have small sites and limited resources and they simply don’t need the power of an installed system. Partly for that reason, they can’t justify the resources such systems require. For them, a hosted blog can be a perfect solution.

What’s Available?

Let’s take a very quick look at three major hosted blogs, from the perspective of establishing a blog for a small, professional site.

Blogger

http://www.blogger.com
Blogger is probably the best known of the hosted blog services, largely due to its being one of the early players in this field and the fact that it is now owned by Google. Everything is free at Blogger. There are no premium fees or add-ons for you to buy. You can fully customize the look of your blog, and even publish it to your own web site using their FTP controls - which is a potentially big plus, and unique among the blogs I’m comparing here. The only area, in my opinion, where Blogger falls short is in information management - it’s somewhat limited if your blog is going to have a number of authors and you want it sortable by categories and other criteria, or if you want to show a partial entry and “click for more” in your presentation.

TypePad

http://www.typepad.com
TypePad is a very solid service, with a depth of features, from a very well respected design team. TypePad’s cheapest service level is $4.95 per month, but for the purposes of this comparison, we need to look at their Pro plan, which is $14.95 per month. For that you get the ability to fully customize the look of your blog. You also get the ability to have multiple authors, categories, tags, and other information management tools. TypePad deserves to be in the conversation because it does remain somewhat popular and it is very well regarded, but TypePad just doesn’t offer anything unique to justify the cost.

WordPress.com

http://www.wordpress.com
WordPress offers strong solutions for a hosted blog and an installed blogs / content management system. But here, I’m looking only at their hosted service, WordPress.com. The basic version of WordPress.com is free, but if you want premium features (and you probably do), then you’ll pay some small fees. Custom CSS is $15 per year, and you need that in order to fully customize your look and feel.  WordPress.com will also occasionally show advertisements on your blog, unless you pay them $30. per year not to - an annoying little pill to swallow. And there are other minimal additional fees for other upgrades. WordPress.com is an extremely professional, well regarded, and well supported system. It excels in information management, and battles only TypePad in its content management features. If you’re posting content from multiple authors, or in multiple categories, or you’re concerned about post length or searching/taging/etc., then WordPress.com is hard to beat, even for a few dollars a year.

One size does not fit all, so what works for one organization or individual may not work for you. But in almost every blogging case, there are options available to blogging match your blogging needs and resources.