By Chris Nash
While blogging can be a lucrative means to earn money for some, for many of us, it is an inexpensive and hopefully absorbing hobby. While experienced bloggers may wish to invest in some professional hosting, for many of us, getting started with a free site is sufficient. Indeed, there are many writers out there who suggest that paid hosting is not even necessary for your blog to be a success.
A simple thought experiment might confirm this for you. For a moment, it is important not to think as a blogger, or a host, but as a typical internet user; a typical blog reader – in particular, the sort of reader you are looking for to visit your blog. Suppose, for example, you are thinking of starting a blog all about classic cars. A classic car enthusiast turns on their computer, and perhaps goes to Google and types in a few search words. In the search results, there are likely to be many, many blogs; after clicking on a few links, our visitor will read some of them, and, if suitably impressed, will perhaps subscribe to them, bookmark them, or leave a comment. At no point did the blog visitor use whether you had a professional-looking “dot com” URL or whether you were using the latest WordPress plugins as a factor to choose your site over any other. All they were interested in was whether your blog delivered the content they were interested in. There are successful, free sites out there. Can you possibly make a success on any platform?
The contenders
For the purposes of this article, the author started with a blog on Posterous – a personal favorite, but with a useful feature that would help in this test. By enabling autopost on a Posterous blog, the post can automatically be reposted to multiple blog sites, In this way, after adding the other platforms – WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Blogger – four free blogs with the same underlying content could be quickly created. The advantage of the Posterous blog is easy setup and posting by email. Posterous sites are clean and simple, with few bells and whistles.
In a similar vein to Posterous, sites on Tumblr.com allow multimedia posting with the push of a button, and also allow posting by email. Like Posterous, Tumblr also aims for easy setup and simple customization with themes, but Tumblr aggressively pushes integration with social media sites; in fact, Tumblr considers the “tumblelog” as social media in its own right, to be shared, reposted, and favorited within the Tumblr community.
Blogger is next; acquired by the gargantuan Google in 2003 and often derided for not getting quite as much attention as other Google products, it is everything you would expect from the search engine behemoth. The focus is more on integration with other Google products than simplicity; some of the menu choices and customization options are not quite entry-level. However size does matter; and a huge number of Blogger blogs does suggest a large amount of community support, not to mention there is surely the suggestion that at least one search engine will crawl the pages.
Finally, there’s the option of a hosted blog at WordPress.com – basically, a slimmed-down version of the full WordPress product presented for free hosting. Offering familiarity and portability if you do ever decide to upgrade to the full WordPress offering – here it is important to distinguish between the hosting offered at WordPress.com and the full product at WordPress.org – it is very much a sandbox version of the full product with limited plugins and customization available.
The first test: ease of use
For the first test, ease of posting was the metric used to compare the sites. It is worth pointing out now that the maturity of Web applications should mean there is no excuse whatsoever for any site to offer poor or difficult editing and publishing options; the Web interfaces should be clean and functional. As far as web interfaces go, Blogger seems to have a slight lead over WordPress when it comes to ease of use, although WordPress does have more comprehensive formatting options. It is the extra options that make it slightly more difficult. Tumblr wins for media, practically one-click publishing, but regular text weblogs are lacking in options and flexibility and, unfortunately, what you see does not always match what you get. I also found the Tumblr interfaces painfully slow. So much for web interface comparisons; Posterous’ web interface is just as competent as any of them, but using Posterous’ post-by-email feature means Posterous wins hands down in this category, using the interface you are likely more familiar with than any other; your email program. This point: Posterous.
The second test: presentation
The end results are of course important. Posterous sites are somewhat spartan, and in fact themes were a late addition, so the end result of a Posterous site is typically a very clean, minimalist, and elegant site. WordPress sites have a tendency to be capable of looking the most professional; but are also capable of being widgeted to the point where they are hideous. Just because WordPress does allow you to add certain gadgetry does not mean that you should. The Blogger sites are generally pleasant and have a larger number of themes to select from out of the box; it seems easier to find something which is relatively attractive, although for some reason it is characteristically Blogger. I am afraid the Tumblr sites do not score high in this area; it appears to be very difficult for a Tumblr site to look pleasant; I was not happy with the look of many of the test pages published. This point: left to personal taste.
The third test: customization
For the customization test, we considered what widgets are available by default, and then whether a particular feature could be customized; in particular, we looked to see if commenting behavior could be modified. Customization on both Posterous and Tumblr is limited to theme selection with perhaps some manual code editing to adjust features of the theme. In theory, Tumblr should support other customizations, such as the Intense Debate commenting plugin; however, when this author tried it, the customization appeared to corrupt the existing Tumblr stylesheet (what looked like HTML or CSS showed up on the page. Very likely a missing close tag, but this test was under the guise of an entry-level user unfamiliar with coding). The WordPress.com selection of plugins is fairly limited and sparse; certainly not the big names you would look for on a hosted WordPress site, although, failing all else, it does allow HTML-level customizations. The widgets on offer do not allow for much in the way of customization other than additional page elements. Finally, Blogger seems more open to customization and, simply by virtue of the number of Blogger sites around, is supported by many plugin vendors. Of course, Google would like this to be the case for their own Adsense monetization. Intense Debate installed painlessly on Blogger and within moments, the acclaimed CommentLuv was running on a blogger site. If any one customization might be enough to select one blog host over another, CommentLuv is possibly it. This point: Blogger.
The fourth test: acceptability
For an acceptability test, we tried to “claim” each blog (with their default domain names such as blogname.posterous.com) with the big name in blogging directories, Technorati, see how the indexing engines would vary in their treatment of free blogs over hosted domain name ones. Technorati immediately did not like the Posterous site URL, and while it recognized the Tumblr and Blogger URLs as hosted blogs, there must be a considerable amount of code on these pages that left Technorati unable to tell that the pages were in English. Only the WordPress site was accepted and indexed without question. Likewise from a human perspective, a WordPress blog seems more acceptable; it is what a blog should look like. This point: WordPress.
Conclusion
This article set out to answer the question “who’s best?” out of the four platforms put to the test, and which offered the best opportunity to be successful. However, the article also cleverly avoided defining precisely what “best” actually meant, and “successful” can mean different things to different people as well. You may measure success in terms of traffic, financial return, or perhaps some other form of contentment; the best option for you might be ease of use, flexibility, appearance, or ability to upgrade to a hosted solution later. The scores above came out pretty even; I am willing to give Tumblr the benefit of the doubt as I have seen impressive things done with it. Take a look over which of the tests above are most important to you, and let that be your guide; in brief though, this author would recommend Posterous for ease of use, WordPress.com for future upgradability, Blogger for features (relative to other free offerings), and Tumblr for social integration. No matter what path you choose, there is no substitute for hard work when it comes to looking for success. Best wishes!
Chris Nash is a mathematics graduate and a software engineer from the United Kingdom, currently residing in the Central Coast area of California. He strives to combine his expertise in technology and the Internet with his passion for writing. In his latest venture, http://reinventingme.posterous.com, Chris details how major life changes have presented him with an opportunity to start all over again with many aspects of his daily life, including his writing and blogging. Chris may be found on Twitter as @darlingman1970.
Related Post:
- – Blogging Wars – WordPress Vs Blogger Part 1
– How To Choose A Domain Name – 5 Must Follow Tips
– Good SEO Writing and Keeping Blogs on Topic
– Does Twitter Really Generate Traffic to My Blog?
– Beginning a Blog With Posterous
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