Free Blogging Platforms
There are many free blogging platforms available for use by web designers or website owners. However, it is important to note that all of these free services are created to equal. Some contain entirely too much advertising, while others can be slow or difficult to use or figure out. In the end, of course, you will have to select the blogging platform that works best for you, but you will want to be on the lookout for one that is reliable, user friendly, and that helps you to create attractive, well polished, and well edited posts. The purpose of a blogging platform is, basically, to make your life easier and to make your blogs more readable and user friendly.
You have the option of going with a traditional blogging site, such as Blogger or Xanga, but these will not be hosted on your own website. Unfortunately, this is only one of the downsides of using sites such as this. These sites contain a great deal of distracting advertising, require extensive knowledge of HTML to design as you want, and make you look unprofessional. While these sites might be all right for a personal use blog, you will definitely not want to use them for anything business related.
The better choice for anyone really is to find a reliable blogging platform that can be used on your own site. One of the best is WordPress. Not only does this platform allow for the use of multiple bloggers, making it ideal for those looking to operate a small magazine or press, but it also has just about every feature you could possibly want. These include being W3C compliant, having pre made templates for use, allowing users to create pages unrelated to the blog, allowing for comments and trackbacks, built in spam protection, the ability to import posts from another platform, and security and blog protection features. All of this is free of charge, and there really are no catches here.
Another blog platform that is gaining in popularity is Text Pattern. This site is WordPress' biggest competitor and offers many of the same features. However, Text Pattern has not been around as long as WordPress and therefore lacks some of the backing of the competition. While most people do prefer WordPress, Text Pattern is particularly good for extreme beginners as it has a text to HTML convertor and several help features and tutorials.
Other well known and generally well reputed platforms include Serendipity, Eggblog, and Movable Type. In the end, however, it does not really matter which blogging platform you decide to go with, providing it showcases your material in a way that both you and your readers can be proud of and is comprehensive and easy to use for you and any other authors who will be working on the blog. The best advice is to take your time, shop around a bit, and try out many different platforms before making your final selection.
