With all the noise about social networking sites
in the last several years, it's easy to forget that if you've got more
to say than what can be expressed in 140 characters, or want to do more
than post brief updates, your best bet is a blog.
There are a wealth of blogging services and software out there -- so
which should you use? If you're a business or other professional
organization, you probably want to use full-bore website building software
that includes a blogging component. However, that type of software
requires experience with server setups, HTML code and site management.
If you don't have that expertise, or want to spend your valuable time
on creating content rather than wrangling with technical issues, you
can opt for a service that hosts your blog for you -- for free. These
hosted blogging services take care of all the nitty-gritty backend work,
and allow you to focus on what's most important to you: The content of
your blog.
They offer pre-built content management systems that make it easy to
write, edit and manage blog posts, letting you decide whether to write
using WYSIWIG editors or instead insert the code yourself. They also let
you switch back and forth between the two when you want.
That's just the basics, though. Using a hosted service doesn't mean
giving up power and features. They let you easily create polls and
customized forms and integrate with social networking sites, and they
offer considerable site management features, including tools for
handling comments and automatically killing blog spam. They use
sophisticated tools for tracking traffic, and let you dig deeply to find
underlying patterns that may help you draw more visitors. And they have
plenty of online help and community-based support when you run into
problems, or need advice from others who have had the same issues that
you have.
(For a review of microblogging sites that offer quick-and-dirty
blogging tools with a strong social networking component, see our microblogger shootout.)
In this article, I examine two of the best-known hosted blogging services: Blogger and WordPress.
Blogger was one of the first blogging tools available. Launched back in 1999 by Pyra Labs, it was bought by Google in 2003 and has been considerably redesigned since.
WordPress is based on the popular WordPress open source server-based
blogging software first released in 2003 that underlies many sites on
the Web -- Wordpress.org claimed in August of 2011 that its server
software powered nearly 15% of the top million web sites in the world.
(Note: Confusingly, both the hosting service and the blogging
software are called WordPress; the former, which is being reviewed here,
is found at WordPress.com while the latter can be downloaded at WordPress.org and was reviewed as part of our site builder shootout.)
You won't go wrong choosing either. But as you'll see, they're very
different services, aimed at different users. Check out our head-to-head
review to see which is right for you.
