Starting A Blog

To fire up a blog all you need to do is to go to one of the popular free hosting companies' sites, like Google's Blogger or Automattic's WordPress.com, and fill in a few boxes with your e-mail address and pick a password to be on the way.

Once you have an account all you need to do is select a theme from the choices available and start to blog. Easy.

Er, but what are you going to blog about?

There is a saying in blogging that content is king. The best looking site in the world isn't going to get return visitors if it is incredibly dull. And most people will class a site as incredibly dull if they don't perceive that there is something in it for them. Usually in an entertaining fashion or in pure useful information. If you can combine both you are likely to be on to a winner.

But it is also amazing what people will obsess about. So some really simple issue that you consider quite trivial can turn out to be a big success. And, unfortunately, there is no alternative to the old fashioned "suck it and see" route of starting the blog and seeing if it catches the public imagination.

Either platform will quite easily get the job done. It may be easier to think of them as akin to Apple and Microsoft. With WordPress.com being Apple-ish and Blogger being Microsoft-ish. As far as the themes available go WordPress.com have a bigger choice, seventy-five at last count where Blogger have much fewer in number which they expand by offering some in different colors. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder and you can't see what the options are until you sign up. A bit of a catch-22, that.

But as the accounts are free there is nothing to stop you starting a couple of "junk" accounts, one on each platform, to play around with and then make a decision as to which you like best. At that point you can set up your "serious" blog.

Don't make the mistake of using your intended title for your serious blog on your junk blogs as you won't be able to swap the name at a later date. Once it has being registered to a blog it is out of circulation, otherwise there would be dozens of blogs with the same name out there confusing the heck out of everybody.

The dashboard where you control all the blog settings and write your posts is much better looking and more sophisticated on WordPress.com. But slower to load because of it. Blogger looks less sophisticated, but once you get used to it you can actually do more with it than you can with WordPress.com in terms of tweaking the looks and settings.

If you get semi-serious about your blogging then Blogger may be the better bet. But if your going to get really serious then WordPress has the advantage that it is part of a family and has a bigger brother called WordPress.org. And WordPress.org is what a lot of serious commercial bloggers and web site owners use.

However, to use WordPress.org you would need to set up a paid account with a web hosting company and install the WordPress.org software on their servers yourself (or pay some one to do it for you). But it then gives you total control over what you do in terms of site design, adding advertising and any other things you feel like to the site. But unless you want to pay a fortune to an IT company to maintain it all for you, you will need to know at least some coding in areas like HTML, CSS and PHP. If none of those names mean anything to you then I would recommend WordPress.com as a starter to get yourself under way.

But, and it's a big but, the clincher for a lot of people may be the fact that Blogger will allow you to put adverts on your blog, WordPress.com will not. So if one of the main reasons you are starting it is in the hope of making a little extra money I would read the terms of service deal for WordPress.com carefully and see if it will work for you before setting up the blog.

It's being awhile since I wrote this lens and both Blogger and WordPress.com have seen updates. Blogger now has a new template designer making it much easier for you to tweak the look of your blog to suit your own desires and WordPress has added more themes to take the choice to over 100 in total.

Personally I still favour Blogger as I prefer its simplicity and speed to the more ornate but slower WordPress.

Image handling has been updated on both sites as has the ability to connect to other social media like Twitter to let people know of a new blog post.

There are also plenty of new pretenders to the blogging kingdom with outfits like Tumblr and Posterous picking up enthusiasts.