After eight days we’ve come to the end of our Blogging platforms series – written from an author’s perpective, with limited coding skills. Let’s take an overall look at each of the 6 platforms:
Blogger: –Pros: Flexibility, a good amount of theme control, ease of use. Cons: Bad reliability at times, as well as less than satisfactory speeds. Recommended for blooking, or posting a book in blog form.
WordPress.com: – Pros: Complete feature set, good looking themes, active development, good support. Cons: Severe limitations – almost no customization (can customize CSS if you pay). Stay away, unless they allow you a greater say in your blog’s theme.
WordPress.org: – Pros: Robust, stable, in active development, comes with complete support base, open source, free, the list goe on and on. Cons: Steep learning curve for non web professionals who want to customize their blogs, needs own server. The perfect solution for writing a blook because almost anything can be done with WordPress.
Blogsome: – Pros: Flexible, WordPress features, ease of use with theme customization, hassle-free plugins. Cons: Reliability, no ability to use own domain name. An okay choice, but the inability to use your own domain name (short of using a redirect, which is a waste of time) should detract you from it.
Terapad: – Pros: One stop location for everything you need in a blog, good cuztomization options. Cons: Interface can be improved – not very easy to use for the first timer, only four themes. Terapad is a wild card – still very new, but promising. Only time will tell as to how it all shapes up.
And, last, but not least:
Vox: – Pros: Ease of use trumps all other 5 selections, huge selection of themes, seamless integration with third party web apps. Cons: Social orientated, so not suitable for blog promotion, no commenting for non Vox users, no theme customization. Use this only if you don’t even know what a blog is. Great for beginners, or for creating fictional blogs of fictional characters. Otherwise, stay away.
And this is the conclusion of the series! Should you ever wish to blog your book, take a stroll through these reviews – I do hope something in there will be helpful to ensure choosing the right blogging platform sets you off to a head start in blooking.
