Step 2: Choose a blogging platform
Posted 14 June 2011 14:31
by Paul
This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.
- Step 1: Blogging overview
- Step 2: Choose a blogging platform
- Step 3: Choose a hosting provider
- Step 4: Buy a domain name
- Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)
- Step 6: Monitor your blog content
- Step 7: Set up social sharing (Internet word of mouth)
- Step 8: Get people to follow your obsession with food
- Step 9: Branding - start with a logo
- Step 10: Site design (content is king, design is queen)
- Step 11: Meet other food bloggers
Step 2: Choose a blogging platform
A blogging platform is the tool used to host the blog. There are several to choose from and most have free and paid versions. Most bloggers blog entirely on free platforms. Some start of on free platforms and then migrate to paid versions when they require the additional features (such as a customised design or additional functionality).
Some of the popular blogging platforms are:
- Blogger
- Drupal (self hosted)
- LiveJournal
- Moveable Type (self hosted)
- Posterous
- SquareSpace
- Tumblr
- TypePad
- WordPress.com
- WordPress.org (self hosted)
When starting out, it doesn’t actually matter which blogging platform you use. They are all easy to use and all fairly similar in functionality. What matters most is ‘putting pen to paper’ (or fingers to keyboard!), to get some content on the screen. Once you have a few blog posts on the Internet and you think that this blogging thing is good fun, you can then start thinking about a long-term home for your blog.
Most blogging platforms will let you export and import content. This means that you can move your content (blog posts) from one platform to another fairly easily.
Having said that, the platforms that we would recommend are WordPress.com (free and easy to use) and WordPress.org (free, easy to use, highly customisable but requires hosting). You could start blogging with WordPress.com and then transfer to WordPress.org if you feel you want additional features.
WordPress.org is a self-hosted solution. This means that although the software is free, you have to host it yourself (or have someone host it for you).
WordPress.org blogs allow new functionality to be added via ‘plugins’. This is software that can be easily ‘plugged into’ your WordPress installation. We are working on a plugin – details coming soon!