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    WordPress, Blogger, or Tumblr: Choosing the Best Blogging Platform

    Blogging is a popular form of content creation today and the number of platforms to choose from can be pretty overwhelming, especially when you want to create a blog for your business and you need to pick one that’s feasibly manageable, but also impressive to your audience. There are several things to consider: the design aspect, whether you want to self-host and, of course, ease of use. Here’s a little information about a few of the most popular platforms to give you an idea of what direction to head in.

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    Blogger:

    If you’re familiar with Blogger, then you know it’s a blogging platform hosted by Google. The beauty of it being hosted for you is that you can jump right into blogging and be able to tell pretty quickly if that’s the platform you’d like to stick with. It’s completely free to use and Google offers plenty of different themes for you to test and get the design you’re looking for.

    Another advantage to a hosted site like this is that that back-end is usually extremely user-friendly. You don’t have to be a Web mastermind in order to know how to publish and design the way you’d like to. As much as this might be an advantage for a newbie, it can also hold you back a little if you’re looking for more.

    Blogger sites tend to look less professional than others because they are so basic and user-friendly. If you do bring a designer in to help you tweak a couple things, there probably won’t be much they can do because Blogger won’t let you change much of the HTML or CSS code, if any.

    If you get to know Blogger on the back-end and find that it’s the user experience you were looking for and you can appreciate the design your audience will see, then I would go with this platform.

    WordPress:

    WordPress is an extremely popular platform to use. I’ve worked with many businesses who’ve had their entire websites on WordPress (not just their blogs) and I always recommend that if they’re not. The tricky part to understand about WordPress is that there is a WordPress.com and a WordPress.org. The reason for that is that they offer hosted sites (just like Blogger) on the .com side as well as self-hosted sites on the .org side.

    Like I said about Blogger, hosted sites are extremely easy to use, but hold you back in design and greater functionality. However, once you’ve started using WordPress and gotten familiar with it, you may want to upgrade to a self-hosting site. Any type of theme, widget, or plugin (tools to personalize your WordPress site) you could ever hope for are available for free or little cost all over the Internet specifically for WordPress blogs.

    If you’re looking for a platform that’s dressed to impress and designer-friendly with lots of option, I would definitely suggest looking at WordPress. The cool thing is that if you’re not sure, you can start with WordPress.com and if you want to upgrade, your hosting company can very easily convert a hosted WordPress site to a self-hosted WordPress site at no extra cost, so you don’t have to manually recreate your posts.

    Tumblr:

    The beauty of Tumblr is that it blows hosted sites out of the water when it comes to great design and ease of use. This platform is as basic as basic gets. The reason for that is it’s not just a blog; it’s a blog living on a social network. You can send people to http://yourbusiness.com and have them arrive on your Tumblr page, but other users of the network can also “follow” your blog and all of your posts will show up in their news feed.

    When you create a post, you start by specifying what kind of post you want to create:

    By telling Tumblr what you want to share, they know how to properly display your post with the most visually pleasing presentation, contributing to the beautiful design of your blog.

    Tumblr is kind of in a league of its own since it’s also a social network. It’s another one that’s easy to jump into without any costs. If you think your content is going to be more visual than text and you need something really simple to use and and beautiful to look at, I would definitely make Tumblr a top contender.

    What blog platforms are you looking into? What’s the most important thing you need to be able to do on your business blog?

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