For the new blogger, choosing a blogging platform can be a challenging prospect. That’s because there are a wide variety of blogging sites available for you to use. Nearly all are free to use, but there also are some that require a fee. Even the free blog sites usually will offer to sell you extras, such as additional storage or paid themes.
By far, the biggest and most popular blogging platform is WordPress, This is is an “open source” site, which means it’s free to use and people can upload and download new tools to the site as often as they please. The biggest benefit of WordPress – and the cause of its popularity, no doubt – is that it is very easy to use. It also comes with tons of instructional videos and guides to help you get your blog up and running and looking exactly the way you want.If are new to blogging or don’t have a lot of experience working with code and web page design, WordPress is a good choice because everything on the site is essentially point and click and drag and drop. You can choose from more than a thousand free “themes”, or pre-made templates that you can upload and simply use as your blog’s background. The site also offers paid themes or you can create your own theme, although this requires a little knowledge about CSS coding.
WordPress allows you to add custom functions to your themes and create plug-ins, such as linking your blog to your Facebook and Twitter pages. It’s easy to add polls or contests to your blog. Plus you can use keywords and tags to make it easy for users to search through your blog postings.
But perhaps the biggest benefit of WordPress is that it will host your blog for you for free. That means you don’t have to buy a domain name or rent space on a server, or even worry about blog maintenance because WordPress will take care of all that for you. Or, if you prefer, you can use the free tools on WordPress to get your blog set up and looking the way you want then migrate it to your own domain. Another popular blogging platform is Tumblr. Like WordPress, it is free and is very easy to use, even if you are a beginner. But Tumblr is targeted more toward bloggers who want to share interesting things they find on the internet that they want to share with their followers, almost like a mixture of blogging and Tweeting.
