Finding a home for your blog
So you’ve decided to start a blog. You’ve decided what the focus of the content is going to be and who the audience is. Now, you’ve just got to turn your ideas into web pages, and to do that, you’re going to have to first work out where on the web your blog is going to live.
There are a number of options open to you.
Choose a free blogging service
From LiveJournal to Vox, Blogger to Wordpress, there are a number of sites which will host your blog for free. All of them will provide the basics you need to blog, such as a text editor, a website address and a way for people to leave comments. Many of them provide you with templates to customise the design of your blog. Some allow voice posts, others allow polls.
TopTen reviews has published a 2007 Blog Services report which compares the features of a number of free blogging services, as well as providing a review of each.
Blog on a social network
If you’ve already set up a MySpace page, and already have friends and contacts there, you might want to take advantage of their blogging service. When you’re logged into your profile, you can just click on ‘manage blog’ then ‘post new blog’.
As an example, check out the MySpace blog of independent publisher, Legend Press.
Blog on a niche site
If you want to create a blog on a particular topic - whether it’s parenting or books or parrots - you might want to check out the sites that you currently visit on that topic. Do they have blogs there already? Do they have an option for you to set up your own?
If they don’t, but you have an idea for a blog that you think can be sustained long-term, you might want to contact the site’s owner and express your interest. By blogging on an established site, you may get a lot more traffic to your posts than you would by going it alone.
For example, if you’re in the UK and want to start a blog about your volunteering experiences, you might want to check out this opportunity from do-it.org.uk. They’ve already got a number of volunteering bloggers and are looking for more.
Host your own blog
If you want to have your own domain name for your blog and have complete control over its design and code, you may want to host it with an independent company.
Both my personal blog and web stuff 4 writers are hosted on one account with BlueHost. Both the blogs use the WordPress software, but instead of following the complex self-installation instructions, I’ve been able to fill in a few boxes on the BlueHost control panel and have had the two blogs automatically created.
My other UK experience with hosting is with 1&1 Internet. They offer free blog set-up with some of their hosting packages as well, but I was only able to chose from a limited set of design templates and wasn’t able to upload any extra plug-ins (pieces of code which allow additional functionality).
Your thoughts
If you already have a blog, what has your experience been like with your blogging service? Would you recommend them? If you were to start from scratch again, would you choose to move your blog somewhere else?
