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Blogging Platforms: Which One is Right for Your Business?

The six most commonly used blogging services

If you’re just starting a web log for your business, or thinking about it, you should

know about the various types of blogging platforms, their levels of

difficulty and their costs. Software starts at free, but limited, and

goes up to business-level costs and support. Here’s a list of the six

most common blogging platforms. There are many more blogging

communities and software available, which we can cover at a later time.

1) Blogger (http://www.blogger.com)

Owned by Google, Blogger is one of the more popular free services.

You can set up a blog on their site relatively easily. With Blogspot,

they host your blog posts, template design, and software. You set up an

account, choose a template, and start typing!

Blogger also allows you to set up a blog using your own hosting space.

For instance if your ISP (the company that provides your internet

access) gives you free hosting space, you can use that instead of

Blogger’s space. This is helpful if you want to post a lot of pictures

and you exceed Blogger’s limit. If you’re brand new to blogging and

don’t have your own hosting space or don’t know what it is, start with

letting Blogger set up everything for you.

2) Vox (http://www.vox.com)

Owned by Six Apart, Vox is another free service. It’s incredibly

easy to use and they have a lot of easy to install templates - just

choose one and the look of your site changes immediately. They also

make it easy to add pictures, books, and music. Vox is big on building

community and encourages members to interact with each other and join

discussion groups. Vox has varying levels of posts: public, friends

only, and private, just to name a few. So you can decide who sees your

entries and who doesn’t.

3) LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com)

LiveJournal is one of the original journal sites. Another free

service, it’s also easy to set up and use. You can friend other people

and participate in topic-based communities. Like Vox, LiveJournal

allows you to restrict your posts to certain audiences.

4) Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com)

Wordpress is yet one more free service. You can find free

templates, set passwords on posts, and even set posts to show up on a

future date. It’s a powerful and versatile hosting service. While

similar to Blogger, it appears to have a lot more available options and

customization.

Also like Blogger, you can use your own web space to host a

Wordpress blog. But with Wordpress, you install the software on your

server and tailor everything to suit your needs there. Wordpress (http://wordpress.org)

is open source software. That means the background source code is

available to anyone. This allows developers to improve the software and

to more easily make plug-ins that work along with it. With plug-ins,

you can use spam blockers to help prevent spam comments (one of the