If you like having lots of choices for how your blog will look, you’ll find Blogger theme options quite limited, especially compared to WordPress.com. If you’re one of those folks who complains about too many choices, however, choosing from the seven basic choices (with different color schemes) could be quite pleasant.
Whereas Blogger is for folks who just want to blog, TypePad from SAY Media is a specialized site host and content management system. It has been around a long time, and though it hasn’t gotten the same media attention as its rivals in recent years, it’s still among the top 500 trafficked websites.
TypePad’s big brother, Movable Type (MT), was one of the first industrial-strength blogging platforms, starting right around the same time as Blogger. A few months after Google bought the company that created Blogger, the MT developers (called Six Apart) ended the practice of distributing MT for free. The hosted version started in 2003 and has always been a paid, commercial product. When noncommercial bloggers who still had to install MT and connect it to a database (no easy task in those days) had to start paying a fee to run MT, many fled to the upstart WordPress. Eventually, Movable Type 4 was released as open source software. Today you can install Movable Type on a server for free; TypePad costs around US$100 annually.
We don’t have to tell you about the power of Blogger’s connection with Google. What may surprise you is the reach of WordPress—more than three-quarters of all blogs on the web run on WordPress (either self-hosted or at WordPress.com)! WordPress is among the top 25 sites in terms of traffic.
You can use WordPress either on your own web space (using a hosting company as described in Chapter 1) or on WordPress.com. Sometimes you’ll hear WordPress veterans talk about “self-hosted WordPress sites” or “WordPress-dot-org sites” to refer to WordPress running on a server. Self-hosted WordPress is typically updated with new features twice a year, with occasional smaller updates that are usually focused on plugging security holes. Depending on your hosting company, you may be responsible for keeping your site updated. The bigger hosts (and WordPress.com) handle this for you.
If you’re serious about blogging, and really do want to try out blogging on a hosted system before creating your own website, we highly recommend starting out at WordPress.com.
Consider these advantages:
Large and strong community of users and developers.
Excellent technical support.
More than 100 free theme choices (and more than a handful of premium themes). When you choose a self-hosted location, hundreds of free and premium themes become available.
An easy way to determine how your audience is building through detailed statistics.
Freshly Pressed on the WordPress.com home page highlights dozens of posts every day, giving you the chance to shine.
Simple export of your dot-com site to a self-hosted WordPress site (even porting your audience to the new site for a small fee). WordPress can usually import posts from another blog system, too.
WordPress.com users often get to see and work with new features before they are released to self-hosted users.
Regardless of what vendor you choose, you will have to think about these things:
What to name your blog.
What address (uniform resource locator, or URL) to use to help people find your blog.
Writing your About page.
A few things to think about when naming your blog:
Most likely, the title should reflect the primary topic(s) you expect to cover in the blog.
Use a pithy title! Both Blogger and WordPress allow a subtitle or tagline that allows for more expansive explanations of your blog.
If you are expecting to create a separate site for your book (see Chapter 11), avoid giving your author website blog the same title.
Don’t just toss off a title! Give it some thought, unless you plan to make the blog private while you work out your topic schedule and other details. While you can nearly always change the title of your blog, this is part of your brand. Often the title will also be reflected in your web address (which you can’t change).
Consider these facts:
Every site on the web has a unique, specific address.
WordPress is the only vendor that talks about its size; they say about 100,000 new blogs are created every day.
The reality is that whoever you choose to host your blog, millions of blogs are already registered on your chosen site, so finding your unique address can be tricky. Always check first for your blog’s title (or some shortened version). If you’re focusing on a particular topic, look for an address that people interested in that topic might search for. You may want to start with your name, if it’s not especially common. Have some backup ideas ready. You’ll learn right away whether the address is available.
No matter what topics you explore, your blog should always reflect your personality. Every blog vendor lets you create a static page that allows readers to find out what your blog is about. Often the first thing a reader does after finding an interesting blog post is check the About page to see if the blog is worth following or subscribing to. This makes your About page critical in finding and building your audience.
Use the About page to describe what prompted you to start the blog, the topics you cover, and as much as you want to reveal about yourself. Remember that you’re making a first impression, so imagine what your reader wants to know about the person behind the words.
Now that you are set up with your blog, the next step is posting blog entries consistently all the way to your book’s publication.
