If you are the casual writer looking to enter the “blogosphere” with minimal effort, and almost no technical skills, then free blogging sites and software is for you. Both of these common sites for blogs feature free blogs, great hosting, and offer an easy to use interface.
Wordpress is a high powered blogging website. After a quick sign-up you are ready to create the blog and get your content online. Free Wordpress blogs will have the format of yourbloghere.wordpress.com, so this tells everyone that you’re using a free blogging tool. This shouldn’t dissuade anyone from using this great free tool though. Wordpress also has some of the best looking blog themes on the internet which look very professional, they provide a stats counter with info about the visitors to your blog, and a huge online community of users.
There is another option which allows the more advanced user to create a Wordpress blog in his/her own url. Visit Wordpress.org for a free download of the software necessary to setup a Wordpress blog on your own site with your own domain. The advantages to this are that you can use your own domain name, place adsense ads on the blog for revenue, and you still get the community, themes, etc that all Wordpress users enjoy. I personally use this version of Wordpress to run the blog and have found that it works very well, not to say it doesn’t have faults but it works together very well and there is a large support community behind it.
Blogger by Google is also a very well known blog host with a great reputation. The process is similar to Wordpress. Sign-up, choose the blog name, and then start creating the content. Free blogs will all have a url of yourblogsname.blogspot.com. One downside of a free Blogger blog is that since Google needs money to host and provide the software etc, Google maintains the right to show Adsense on blogs to generate revenue. This isn’t a big deal since Adsense works great and shows relevant ads, but it may deter some users. The themes and such for Blogger are not as good as Wordpress, but nonetheless still look great.
One feature of Blogger I just found really adds a plus to the service. Blogger for Word supposedly allows users to edit their blog’s content from inside Microsoft Word, and then upload the content to their blog through a toolbar in Microsoft Word. They can also save posts as drafts to upload later. I haven’t personnaly used this feature either but it seems that it will provide a big incentive to user Google’s Blogger and increase ease of use.
Whether you choose Wordpress or Blogger to create your blog is your choice, but both make the standards that other online blogging tools live up to, and their ease of use is incredible.
Good Wordpress themes aren’t hard to come by these days, and many of them are free as well. Woo Themes really makes some of the best I have ever used though. Each of their themes are made with the end user in mind. Using their themes is extremely easy and their customer service is impeccable. This site is run off of their “The Gazette Edition” theme, and I constantly receive e-mails from users who are asking about where I got my theme from. Too bad I can’t boast anymore and say that I design all my websites by hand, but the benefits of using professional themes like this really outweighs that of the work required for the boasting.
