stevensreeves

Boomer Turned Zoomer

Blog for Business | Front Office Box

We’ve already posted quite a lot here and in the Front Office Box blog about who should be blogging, why they should be blogging and how they should be blogging.  We’ve also included a lot of material to help people understand some of the mysteries of SEO.

What we haven’t done is talked about the blogging software available, so this is like a taster – we’ll get into more detail later.

The most popular blogging platforms around (with me at least) are:

All sorts of other services include some kind of publishing platform but don’t meet my criteria of blog software. (Probably Tumblr and Posterous don’t either).

Each of these has it’s own advantages, but

  1. I immediately rule out Typepad, because it isn’t free.  Why pay?
  2. Blogger is typical Google software. It works, there’s some rudimentary customisation, and of course installing Adsense is a piece of cake.  But mostly Blogger is there for the amateurs.  You can see one of ours at Serious About Selling – this never did anything for us which is why it’s now defunct.
  3. Wordpress, hosted by Wordpress is free and offers quite a number of themes so the user can choose layout, colors etc.  This version offers limited ability to do any SEO stuff, but does provide access to html (for embedding videos etc.) and also offers an option for hosting domains.  This allows the user to get away from having the .wordpress address in the URL.  What it doesn’t do is accommodate the hundreds of plugin tools provided for free by the Wordpress community.  Goto to Avertit for an example – it’s one of ours.
  4. Wordpress selfhosted is be real deal when it comes to blogging.  It’s free, but we have to pay for the hosting, and we have to have our own domain, and manage our own DNS. If we accept those responsibilities this is the very best option, because of all the plugin tools and alternative themes we can use for free.  This blog is Wordpress self hosted.
  5. Tumblr is a combination of blog and microblog. The software is somewhat limited, particularly in terms of SEO, but does what it’s supposed to really nicely.  There are two major wins for Tumblr a) we can host our own domain there – see Front Office Box News and b) the iPhone app is just awesome.
  6. Posterous from an ease of use perspective is the best by miles.  Limitations are no customization (coming soon), SEO tools or capability to display Adsense.  Major strengths are it’ll cope with just about anything we email to it, and autopost to other sites with particularly good integration with Facebook.  Check out stevensreeves to see how we’re using Posterous.

Obviously all of my comments are my opinion, and I’ve probably missed something important, so you should check them all out to see what works for you.

Let us know what you think, especially if you can correct any mistake I’ve made here.

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