They are, in no particular order of ranking: WordPress, Typepad, BlogHarbor and Squarespace.

I have used them all and currently have active blogs on WordPress and BlogHarbor. It must be two years or more since I used Typepad or Squarespace but even then they were platforms I was happy to recommend.

WordPress seems to be growing in popularity for business sites as well as more personal blogs. Here I’m focused on WordPress as downloadable from WordPress.org, not WordPress.com, which is the same software but in its hosted format. A Google Trends graph  shows a significant comparative growth in popularity of WordPress over Typepad for the past three years. I don’t know how much of the WordPress result is for WordPress.org and how much for WordPress.com: an attempt to do a separate trend analysis on wordpress.org drew a blank.

The WordPress.org site’s own description of this software is “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability”. Which description they admit is a mouthful.

In plainer language, WordPress is an excellent, even outstanding, blogging platform which looks good, is well built and is not difficult to use.

It is easy – and free – to download and relatively easy to install on your web hosting service of choice. “Relatively” easy because the installation does in fact need some technical knowledge, if nothing else the ability to find one’s way around the control panel of the web hosting service. Many web hosting services include the Fantastico tool on the control panel, which takes a  lot of the fiddling around out of the process. There are also many third party providers who for a fee will set up and configure a WordPress blog.

If you are not paying someone to look after your blog and you will need to be taking personal responsibility for its care and operation, the support for installation, configuration and later tweaking or troubleshooting comes from the WordPress community and there is extensive online documentation of various problems. You do need to have an idea of what you are looking for.

After a fair bit of trial and error, I can now install a WordPress site and keep it running fairly well. If I were to strike problems beyond my capabilities to fix I know there are many professionals who are WordPress-savvy.

A very useful feature of WordPress – and other platforms covered in this post, is that you can set it up either as your basic website or as a sub-directory. So in terms of the Web address (URL) you could have your blog address as  www.mysite.com or as www.mysite.com/blog. WordPress have also provided a new feature which enables you to have your home page on the blog as a static page, much as if it were a traditional website – and then the blog posts on subsequent pages. Best of both worlds.

So there are many good reasons to choose WordPress as a blogging platform.

At the same time, I know from helping some very smart clients and friends who do not want to spend time “with their heads under the hood”, that the same WordPress which is a delight for many technically-skilled friends is a fog-inducer for some people. 

Using WordPress as a hosted service from WordPress.com is one solution to that problem. However, unless things have changed a lot, a wordpress.com site is not as configurable as a lot of business people would like. A former limitation of a WordPress.com site from a business use viewpoint was the inability to have your own domain: the blog’s address had to include “wordpress” in the format myblogname.wordpress.com That problem has now been overcome and for a cost of $10 a year a wordpress.com site can have its address in the format www.myblogsite.com.

Another solution would be to find a blog hosting service which offers the functionality of an installed WordPress.org site, with full support provided by the web hosting service or a third party provider. I know there are hosting services which claim to offer that sort of support, but I don’t know any I can recommend. Given how good WordPress is, I’m hoping there will soon be hosting/support services I’ll able to recommend as confidently as I can the next two services here, Typepad and BlogHarbor.

Typepad tends to be the default, fully hosted blogging platform recommended for business blogging where there is any concern that the person or business might find that the learning curve for WordPress is an obstacle, or if it is thought they might simply be more comfortable with the more “turnkey” Typepad solution, as compared with, say, WordPress which needs more configuration. Typepad is an excellent product, great for someone who is non-technical and just wants to get started and have the blog be able to grow. It is available at several levels of sophistication, with a commensurate scale of prices: Basic, Plus, Pro and Business.

Basic, at $4.95 a month or $495 $49.50a year, is good – and basic, as it says. You can have one blog. My experience in testing the Basic version a few years ago was that I quickly became frustrated with the lack of some features which were not part of the deal but were included in other versions. So upgrading to Plus at $8.95 a month($89.50 a year) was a no-brainer and financially easy. That gave me the ability to have up to three blogs, with more customisation available and additional storage and webspace. I did not test Pro, but it provides for an unlimited number of blogs, with 1Gb of storage and 10Gb of bandwidth a month. That could be a great solution for a company with a number of potential bloggers. There is a 30 day free trial, to qualify for which you must provide credit card details: I have never heard of anyone having a problem cancelling before the end of the 30 days. The Business option is enterprise strength, has “custom pricing” (I think that’s what used to be called “price on application”) and claims to be ” the only enterprise-grade hosted blogging service designed for media companies and enterprises”.

As I don’t use Typepad these days I have no current personal knowledge about the reliability and speed of service. So for the want of any information to the contrary, I assume it is good to excellent. There were a few “growing pain” problems in late 2005, but I have not picked up any stories of complaints recently. There are plenty of very well known, highly visited blogs using Typepad.

BlogHarbor is a service I have used extensively and have long recommended for people in the small business sector. My basic reasons are: a) a couple of years ago I found the underlying Blogware software platform more configurable for me than Typepad was at that time, and b) the quality and speed of service from BlogHarbor looked good and still does, more than two years along the track.

Like Typepad and Squarespace, BlogHarbor provides a fully hosted service, with specialised blogging software. As with any of the platforms I’ve used, there is a learning curve. With BlogHarbor, one of the key elements of this learning is about how to create and manipulate the “components” of code which go in the blog sidebars to produce various items, such as an image or block or text for a service or product you want to advertise.

There is a 30 day free trial, for which the user does not have to provide any credit card details. Just sign up and you can have a blog to experiment with. The only difference I know of (there may be more) between the trial version and the paid is that while you are on the trial version you cannot have a domain name of your choosing: in that period your web address for the blog will be in the form mynewblog.blogharbor.com (there is no doubt a similar limitation with free trial periods for other services). A simple solution is to upgrade to the paid version before the end of the 30 day free trial.

There are two levels of paid service, Standard and Plus, at $8.95 a month or $89.50 and $14.95 a month or $149.50 a year respectively. All levels of BlogHarbor service are fully featured (with the slight caveat as above about the free, 30 day trial service).The differences are in disk space and bandwidth. Which is why I like to tell people that the decision to upgrade from Standard to Plus is likely to be a decision triggered by success in attracting traffic. There is a detailed explanation of features here. I don’t know what other re-sellers of Blogware are around – you can complete a form on the Blogware site to find out about re-sellers in your region. That to me is a rather odd way of providing information about a digital service. Although I am in Australia, I want to be able to choose from re-sellers wherever they are physically located, and on the basis of factors like their commitment to rapid service, preferably delivered in non-technical language .

Squarespace is also a fully hosted service. I first looked at and tried Squarespace when it was fairly new on the blogging block, probably over two years ago now. It was good then and looks from the website to have grown into a quite elaborate set of services. I noticed the other day that a complex international organisation to which I belong has its site hosted by Squarespace. In fact, going on the website description, Squarespace might well belong more in the category of “complex social software – hosted” than in the “fully hosted blog” category. But I do believe that, like Typepad and BlogHarbor, it can be an excellent solution for a business wanting to get started in blogging without that being a major undertaking.

There are several categories of pricing/feature sets: Personal, Business and Elite, ranging from $7 a month for Personal – Basic to $175 a month for Elite packages. There are detailed listings of the features/services that come with each level of pricing.

As with BlogHarbor, there is a 30 day free trial without the requirement of credit card details in advance.

Again, I welcome suggestions and comments about additions, omissions, or matters of detail.

Post from: EveryJoe

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