Alright! You recognized your organisation can benefit from a blog and you know what you will blog about. The next step is critical: Choosing your blog platform, the “software” to edit, publish and host your blog.

Choosing the right blog platform is critical. You might set out as “let me give this a decent try”, but once you made your choice, moving from one blog software service to the other is an absolute drag, as we will cover more in depth further down in this post.

Comparing blog platforms

The most popular blogging platforms are:

• Blogger, owned by Google
• The WordPress duo: WordPress.com (hosted by them) and WordPress.org (selfhosted)
• Tumblr
• The Six Apart duo: Typepad (hosted by them) and Movable Type (selfhosted).
  They also offer the lesser known VOX, a free blogging platform.

Each of the blog platforms has specific pro’s and con’s. It is difficult to find a single article covering an unbiased, comprehensive and objective comparison covering all features, ease of use, flexibility, cost, support and technical limitations.

In this series, we have turned it around: We started from you, the non-profit organisation, narrowing down the options you have, based on the 5 most critical questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Will you host the blog yourself?
2. Do you want basic or advanced functionality?
3. How important is ease-of-use and support for you?
4. How about layout, design and navigation?
5. Is customizability a must for you?

This series is largely based on my own experience. I have used Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr extensively. For the Six Apart family, Dave Barnhart, a professional in the social media business (see box at the bottom of this post), kindly helped to fill in the blanks.

The blog market. Damned the choices!

Here are some examples of blogs using the different platforms we will discuss. You will immediately see some of the typical differences and flavours:

• verslaafdaandehorizon.blogspot.com is a typical Blogger hosted blog, with a standard template, using the Blogger domain name. This is a “Blogger out-of-a-box” blog.
• www.theroadtothehorizon.org is a good example for a heavily customized template and home made widgets in a Blogger hosted blog. It uses its own domain name.
• theotherworldnews.blogspot.com is a Blogger hosted blog, with a Blogger domain. It’s main post has no content, but runs a script to show the content. It is an example of the kind of extensive post customization which is possible on Blogger.
• www.thehorizon.info: Moving on to Tumblr. Simple blogging, with plain vanilla posts, mostly clips from the Internet, using its own domain name and a slightly customized template, hosted on Tumblr.
• www.aidnews.org, www.aidblogs.org, and www.changethru.info are all hosted on Tumblr, with their own domain names and slightly customized templates. Each is used for a unique feature Tumblr offers: converting RSS feeds into posts.
• www.blogtips.org and www.haveimpact.org are examples of WordPress.org blogs, hosted externally, using their own domain names, with out-of-the box templates, theme and widgets.
• Ray Silversein’s Blog is a typical Typepad blog using one of TypePad’s 363 different themes.
• Randy’s Journal is a typical Movable Type blog with little or no customization.
• Business Blogging Pros is a Typepad blog using the stock templates, achieving the custom look with only minor style sheet modifications. (Take particular note of the footer)
• Andrew Keen is an example of what can be done by customizing TypePad’s templates.
• Barak Oboma’s Campaign website is a Movable Type site that shows what can be done with just a little customization.
• The Huffington Post is probably the best example of a Movable Type blog, which is fully customized.

A repeated word of caution: Think first!

Think before you jump, Please! Choosing a blog platform is not about your blogging needs today, but to think about what you want to do with your blog 2-5 years from now. Pick a platform that can support those future needs. Moving a blog is difficult, painful and time consuming.

Even though some can easily import posts from an other platform, internal links to your own posts won’t change automatically. Links to pictures you uploaded to your previous blog host won’t migrate neither. Your widgets, plug-ins and blog layout will disappear, to be re-tweaked from scratch. In short: A serious blogger should spends some serious time finding a serious blog platform. Once you made the choice, you are pretty much stuck. So think of your needs today, but also how you would like your blog to evolve in the next years to come.

Changing blog platform, what is the big (link) deal?

Moving from one blog platform to another, hundreds (if not thousands) of internal links to your blog will be broken… Hold on a sec, you are redirecting “myorganisation.org” from one blog platform to the other, so it remains “myorganisation.org”, no? So what goes broken then?

Each blog platform has its own way of (automatically) forming the URLs for your pages:
As an example, on Blogger, your post will be called:

• http://www.myorganisation.org/2008/1/my-introduction.html

On WordPress it will become one of these (dependent on your choice):

• http://www.myorganisation.org/2008/1/my-introduction/ (and not “HTML”)
• http://www.myorganisation.org/my-introduction/
• http://www.myorganisation.org/2008/1/16/my-introduction/ (and not HTML)
• http://www.myorganisation.org/?p=123
• http://www.myorganisation.org/archives/123

This problem is one of the reasons why I never moved my personal blog away from Blogger. It has 1,700 internal links. These would all need manual editing when I move to another blog platform.

Need another reason why choosing the right blog platform is critical?

An even more important and more longer term effect of changing your post URLs: you will loose all “Google juice”, as Dave calls it…:

Over the lifespan of your blog, Google and other search engines have collected all your page URLs, and attributed a PageRank to it, which is critical for bringing in new visitors to your site. PageRanks are like gold for serious blog master. Blogmasters will optimize their pages for maximum search traffic, and need be, strip down their pants for a higher PageRank.
Often it takes months before a blog is really fully valued by search engines. All of that would disappear in a few days if you change your URLs.

Dave recently moved a one-year-old blog for a client. There were almost seven hundred links out there on the internet to that blog. When he moved he lost all the Google juice those links provided.

One of my blogs is 30 months old, and has about 1,500 posts and 47,000 (fortyseven thousand !) incoming links. You don’t believe me? Check if for yourself!. Those links provide me with a PageRank of 6, which is at the high end of a blog-o-sphere. You think I will give all of that away, just to change blog platform? I-DONT-THINK-SO…

So, in short: Let me repeat the credo here: “A serious blogger should spends some serious time finding a serious blog platform.” (Amen!)

In the next post, we answer question#1: Should you host your blog or use your blog service to host it?

Writing this series, I got significant help from Dave Barnhart, who filled in the blanks on Typepad and Movable Type.
Dave is a social media strategy consultant, founder of Business Blogging Pros, and a gourmet chef. He and his firm have been helping companies use social media since 2005.
He blogs at Business Blogging Pros and Fumbling Foodie. Check out some of the blogs he has created.

After reading Part 1 in this series, you will agree with me that selecting the right blog platform, the software you will use to create and maintain your blog, is critical. Which of the four platforms we are considering will it be? WordPress, Tumblr, Typepad – Movable Type or Blogger?

Your right selection will be based on a set of criteria, partially technical, partially functional. In this post, we tackle one issue which is a combination of both: Selfhost or not, that is the question.

“Hosting” is the mechanism to store your blogposts (and eventually also the pictures, videos), and the blog software package.
By “Selfhosting” we mean: you store all data and software on your own server.
“Blog service hosting” is where your blog platform does that for you.

When you start a blog, you have two basic options: Either have the blog service “host” your blog or “selfhost”. This choice will determine which blog platform you can use.

Hosting by your blog service is the easiest and cheapest solution.

Blogger, WordPress.com and Tumblr will host your blog for free, under the “blogspot.com”, “WordPress.com” and “Tumblr.com” domains. Typepad does the same on the “typepad.com domain”, but you will have to pay from US$4.95 (Basic service) to US$89.95 (Business Class) per month.

Starting a new blog with any of them is a breeze and requires no technical knowledge. I have several blogs on Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr and can start a new blog in one minute flat. Typepad is not much different.

Can you use your own domain while using blog service hosting?

By default, Blogger, WordPress.com, Tumblr and Typepad give you your own blog address, which is a sub domain of their main domain e.g. “myorganisation.wordpress.com” or “myorganisation.blogspot.com”. But each of them allows you to map your own domain onto a blog hosted by them.

What’s the big deal about using your own domain name?

Well, it is one of the most important branding tools for your blog. “myorganisation.org” says much more than “myorganisation.blogspot.com”.

If you own your own domain, you can easily map that onto the blog you host at your blog service.
For instance The Road to the Horizon is hosted on Blogger. Its physical address is “theroadtothehorizon.blogspot.com”, but I mapped “www.theroadtothehorizon.org”, my own domain, onto it. This is done in two easy steps: I changed one parameter at my domain host to point to my blog service, and another parameter at Blogger’s side to accept the incoming mapping request.

Once done, all my posts will appeared as part of my domain, and not Blogger’s domain:

Tumblr, Typepad and Blogger allow you to use and map your own domain onto blogs hosted by them, for free. On WordPress.com you will have to pay for the mapping service.

The issue of YOUR stuff on THEIR servers…

When you use the blog service to host your blog, all your posts, templates and gimmicks are stored on THEIR servers. This allows you to concentrate on blogging rather than on upgrading software, backup strategies, server performance, bandwidth etc.. You need literally NO knowledge of servers, UNIX, PHP, MySQL etc..

On the other hand, it also leaves you at the mercy of your blog service. If, for one reason or the other, the service goes down, so does your blog. Particularly with Blogger, users have complained their blog ‘disappeared’ all of a sudden, or was reported as spam and deleted. Blogger is very strict on ‘link harvesting’ blogs (a form of spam-blogs), and when they suspect your blog is a culprit, they give you 20 days to prove it ain’t so. It happened to me (see this post), and I can tell you, I was NOT a happy camper thinking two years of work might just disappear.

Your POSTS might be stored safely on their servers, but what about your PICTURES?

If you choose to have your blog service host your blog, your posts are stored on their servers, but your pictures, videos and other files might not. On most blog services you can only upload certain file types (most of the time, only pictures), and up to a certain limit (a few gigabyte). Even if you do so, it is very difficult to retrieve these files if you would ever choose to migrate your blog onto another service.
Imagine what that would mean for my personal blog, hosted on Blogger, which has over 1,000 posts by now, each with at least one picture…

Just like many bloggers, I looked for an alternative. For a while, I stored my pictures in Flickr, my videos on YouTube and all other files on a public fileserver. All fine and for free, until I discovered quite some countries block access to Flickr and YouTube, leaving big blanks in my blog posts for those readers.

In short, your blog service might host your blog, but not many other files.

Selfhosting: Hosting your own blog

Ask yourself: “How critical is my blog really?” It might look like a rhetoric question for any blogger, and more so for a non-profit organisation that wants to start a blog: “Of course, my blog is important!”, you will answer. But, there are many shades of grey. Up to what level of independence will you to, to ensure your critical blog remains “On Air”.

Some organisations (or even individual bloggers) want to control the uptime, the performance, load speed and the server features. They would not want to run the risk waking up one morning and finding their blog ‘gone’. They also (rightfully) want to store their documents (pictures, videos, PDF files,…) on their own servers, within their own domain.
Selfhosting is the solution here: you install the blogging software and all related backend systems (like PHP and MySQL servers) on your own machines.

There is one more important thing: Self-hosted blogs require you to make a conscious effort to perform regular backups of your blog. In addition, expect to upgrade your self-hosted blog’s software a few times per year to make use of newly implemented features, bug fixes and notorious security holes. Have a look at WordPress.org’s upgrade instructions to give you an idea… Can you handle that?

When you selfhost your blog, you need to pay particular attention to security. Self-hosted blogs are notoriously easier to hack than a Typepad or WordPress.com blog.
Ensure the admin password is secure (and avoid using the admin login name “ADMIN”). Use SFTP rather than FTP to securely transfer files to your hosting service.

Selfhosting: does this mean the machine sits on my LAN?

Actually, few people will run their public website or blog on their own machines within their network. Most prefer to rent a physical or virtual server from specialized hosting services. I use one.com and godaddy.com as hosting services. Cheap, fast and good. (Update July 2010: As time went by, I had to review my opinion about hosting services on GoDaddy. For the worse! And one.com is good as a file repository but definitively not as a blog hosting service). I heard good things about Mediatemple and HostGator too (update July 2010: with which I am experimenting now).

Both Godaddy and Mediatemple have built-in routines to install a range of blog softwares (and other stuff) at the click of a button. At work, one of our blogs runs on Amazon Webservices. They give us a naked (virtual) server and we installed everything from scratch: PHP, MySQL, and the blog software…

Hosting prices vary from a few dollars (my one.com server is about US$2 per month) to a few hundred dollars per month, depending on speed, bandwidth, support and storage capacity.

If you host your blog on your own host, you can also store all documents, pictures, video etc.. on your own domain, without having to involve other storage services (document repositories in technical lingo).

How about internal-only blogs?

If your blog is for internal use within your organisation, you have little choice but to run the server on your LAN. You will have to host your blog on your own physical machine within your firewall to avoid external users accessing your blog.
If that is what you need, you are left in a choice between WordPress.org and Movable Type. Both are available for free download.

Which blog service to chose if you want selfhosting?

The decision to run your blog on your own host, will also pretty much depend on your answers to some of the questions we will tackle in the next parts in this blog series, but if you choose to selfhost, you will have to drop Tumblr, WordPress.com and Typepad as their blogs only run on their servers.

You might drop Blogger too, even though they offer the ability to store your blog on your own host, but the way this is done is rather clumsy and involves FTP (which has its security problems).

So.. your choices are limited: WordPress.org and Movable Type are left if you want to selfhost. On the (much) brighter side: both are amongst the best and most versatile blogging platforms. WordPress.org comes for free, Movable Type is free for developers and individual bloggers and starts at $395 for businesses and $195 for non-profits, which includes one year of free support. But one is far easier to use than the other, as we will see later on in this series.

Concluding:

The blog platforms fall into two categories: those who allow you to selfhost and those who don’t.

If you want to run your blog on your own host – either for internal or external use- WordPress.org and Movable Type are your only choices.

If you want to use blog service hosting then Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad and Tumblr all fall within the criteria. Keep in mind WordPress.com will charge you to map your own domain.

In the next post, we will cover the differences in functionality between these four blogplatforms.

Writing this series, I got significant help from Dave Barnhart, who filled in the blanks on Typepad and Movable Type.
Dave is a social media strategy consultant, founder of Business Blogging Pros, and a gourmet chef. He and his firm have been helping companies use social media since 2005.
He blogs at Business Blogging Pros and Fumbling Foodie. Check out some of the blogs he has created.

Part 1 of this series showed how critical it is to choose the blog platform suited for your needs, before you start.
in Part 2, we covered one of the first questions you need to ask yourself: will I selfhost my blog or not?

Today, we’re covering a topic which is just as critical in deciding which blog software to use: “What will you do with your blog?”. Or even better: “What do you want your blog to do for you?”.

Are you OK with a basic functionality, concentrating on posting text, pictures, video? Are simple standard templates and widgets all you want? Or are you looking for more versatile functions?

Let’s go over the different blog platforms we are covering in this series: Tumblr, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type and WordPress.

Tumblr

Tumblr is very easy to use but has a limited functionality, a limited choice of templates and widgets. You can post text, video and pictures to make simple blog posts and that is about it. That’s all good for someone who wants to publish a blog, has little time for it, and does not care too much about the layout and functionality.

Tumblr has a specific niche in its social networking function where you can “follow” other Tumblr blogs and repost their posts easily. Tumblr also lets you import RSS feeds as blog posts, a feature I am yet to find on any other blog platform.
You can find several browser plug-ins making it easy to clip pieces (text, video or pictures) from any website onto your Tumblr-blog.

I have several Tumblr blogs but use them for some specific purposes in which Tumblr excels:
On The Signs Along the Road, I publish quick and dirty clips from the Internet, which Tumblr does very well, with an excellent cross-posting facility using a Firefox plug-in.
I also use Tumblr’s a unique feature allowing you to integrate an RSS feed from another website and to convert them into a new Tumblr post, a technique I described in this post. The RSS-to-post function I use on AidBlogs, AidNews, Change Thru Info and NonProfit Blogs…

If you are into more serious blogging, though, then Tumblr might not be the right choice for you.

WordPress

Remember that WordPress comes in two flavours: WordPress.org, the self-hosted version, and WordPress.com which hosts your blog for you. Both are very popular amongst bloggers.

WordPress.com gives you all blogging functionality and is easy to use. It does not support more advanced features for its posts and widgets, such as integrating scripts and iFrames.
WordPress.com also does not allow the use of third-party themes. It does not allow the installation of plugins, small software packages that really make its brother, WordPress.org, such a versatile valuable blogging platform.

The self-hosted version of WordPress (WordPress.org) on the contrary offers a wider range of themes and does not impose what you can and can not do in your widgets and blog posts. The biggest plus is the unlimited supply of third-party themes and the myriad of plugins that allow you to add almost any function imaginable.

So no matter what you want to use your blog for, take a serious look at WordPress.

One note, though: to make a WordPress.org blog ‘fire on all cylinders’, a number of plugins need to be installed. When Dave creates a WordPress.org blog for a client, he installs no less that nine plugins. Some of these plugins dramatically affect the SEO (Search Engine Optimization), allow readers to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, and other services and ease the navigation.
For each of my WordPress.org blogs, I install ten plug-ins for the basic functionality I want my blogs to have.

Blogger

Similarly to WordPress, Blogger is a versatile blog platform. Even though they host your blog (dropping their clumsy self-hosting option from the options), Blogger let’s you do whatever you like in HTML, scripting and CSS within templates, posts or widgets. So you can also mess up as much as you want, too.

While Blogger lets you do “anything you want”, an out-of-the-box Blogger only has basic functionalities. Features I find essential like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), “related posts” function, “Read More” options, “Recent comments” features, social media functions, navigation, blog statistics, etc.. will have to be done manually by editing of your template file.
Some of these functions are so advanced or complex to implement, that you need to know what you are doing otherwise you will corrupt your template file, and completely screw up your blog. AND the more you customize your template, the more difficult it becomes to migrate to another template, as I described in a previous post.

Apart from that, the ease-of-use for the blogger, even when writing basic posts, is very different between e.g. Blogger and WordPress. We will cover this in a later post in this series, but let me tell you, Blogger draws the shorter stick by far.

Movable Type/Typepad

Typepad contains all the functionality you will ever need in a hosted blog. Its built-in connectivity to other social media-related services Feedburner, Twitter, Facebook, etc is second to none. The user-interface was recently overhauled making it much simpler to navigate.

If you want to use your blog as a small website then you need to seriously consider Typepad. None of the other blogging platforms have done as good a job with the menu bar as has Typepad. You can have items on the menu bar point to other websites (E.g. WordPress only let you point to your internal pages, and both Blogger and Tumblr don’t cater for this functionality)..

Selfhosted Movable Type is a high-end industrial strength content management system (CMS) wrapped in a blogging platform’s clothing. It is the only self-host blogging platform included in this review that allows additional blogs to be setup under the same installation. Moreover, these additional blogs can be setup by the blog’s admin and do not require an IT person. The Pro version of Movable Type also has built-in support for forums.

On the other hand, Movable Type is not for the weak of heart. It is more difficult to set up and to administrate. Ease-of-use is not its best side.

Concluding:

If you are satisfied with VERY basic blogging functionality, mostly to clip stuff from the Internet, and look for a very simple blog platform, then Tumblr will do.

For more versatility and freedom to publish whatever you want, however you want it, either Blogger, WordPress.com or Typepad will do, with a definite plus for the latter two.

For flexible selfhosted blogs, WordPress.org and Movable Type are your only two choices, but they are also the best blog platforms around, with a definitive plus for WordPress.org’s user friendly approach.

Writing this series, I got significant help from Dave Barnhart, who filled in the blanks on Typepad and Movable Type.
Dave is a social media strategy consultant, founder of Business Blogging Pros, and a gourmet chef. He and his firm have been helping companies use social media since 2005.
He blogs at Business Blogging Pros and Fumbling Foodie. Check out some of the blogs he has created.

In this series, we looked at the criticality of choosing the right blog platform and how the different blog platforms differ in functionality and in the way they host the blogs.

Now, let’s concentrate more on you, the blogger. Do you want to concentrate on writing posts, without spending too much time on fiddling with layouts, widgets, plug-ins? Or when you want to change some basic features on your blog, do you need to read twenty manuals and follow 15 web development courses?
However you twist it, the ease-of-use is one of the most important selection criteria for a serious blogger.

Let’s look at the different web platforms.

Tumblr

With its “easy to clip stuff from other sites”, Tumblr is the simplest to use by far. It has a slightly quirky dashboard function, is very limited in its blog functionality, but easy to use. Posting is a breeze, and posting is pretty much all you can do, within going “the hacking way”.

Officially, Tumblr offers free technical support, but my experience with their support is a bit varied. Sometimes I get immediate response, sometimes I never get an answer. Some issues never got resolved.

What I really regret about Tumblr, however, is the lack of an active discussion forum for the users, making social crowd sourced support non-existent. A real pity.

Blogger

Blogger used to be a close second in ease-of-use. Most people start using Blogger in no time, without knowing much about the what and how. I did not know one bit of HTML before I started my first Blogger-blog 32 months ago, and it took me just a few hours to start. Nowadays, I can start a Blogger blog one in a minute flat. I can write a post in 30 seconds.

But Blogger has some argh-“features”!! Blog editing sometimes makes my pull out my hair. The editor window is small, the WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) features are clumsy, and their preview function sucks. Switching templates is a nightmare.

Worse of all: since the two and a half years I have been using Blogger, I have not seen many changes nor efforts to make it all easier for the users. Blogger is today what it was 32 months ago. Not a big surprise as it seems to be a trademark of all web applications owned by Google…

Blogger’s support is totally non-existent, but their large user community is self-supported through an active discussion forum. However if you get into real trouble, you will be stuck. There are some horror stories on the discussion forums of people loosing their blog overnight, never to be seen again. And Blogger… they kept silent…

WordPress

When I first looked at WordPress (.com and .org alike), two years ago, I found it was not much easier to use than Blogger. Since then they overhauled the user interface completely and added many new features. Today, WordPress is really easy to use, beating Blogger by far.

Editing is easy, with a perfect preview function. Switching templates, integrating and upgrading widgets and plug-ins is a breeze, even on the self-hosted version (WordPress.org).

WordPress has a very loyal and dedicated user community which will help you with just about anything through several active discussion forums. The single instance where I needed technical help for one of my test blogs on WordPress.com, their support was fast, and to the point.
WordPress.org, the selfhosted brother offers no technical support unless if you pay for it.

Typepad

Just like WordPress, Typepad has made a lot of progress in terms of ease-of-use. Many put TypePad’s user interface second to none. Some of Dave’s clients are business people already spending 60-80 hours per week running their companies, and have little time to learn a blogging tool.. All of them comment on how easy Typepad is to write blogposts.

In terms of user interface for creating and managing posts/pages, managing comments, managing sidebar content, etc, Typepad and WordPress are about equal. They use drag-and-drop techniques and are overall pretty intuitive.
One feature Typepad has (and Wordpress does not), is ‘TypeLists’, which give you the ability to create blocks of sidebar content that can be used across multiple blogs under the same account.

Typepad’s support is excellent. They even monitor Twitter and often respond to users on Twitter within minutes. Typepad’s support staff is knowledgeable and the depth of their knowledge is deep. They offer a series of free webinars (live and pre-recorded) on topics such as blog design, social media, using a blog as a website, SEO, etc).

Movable Type

Movable Type unfortunately lacks many of Typepad’s ease-of-use features. Even though Typepad was born out of Movable Type, both products have gone their own way, to the decrement of Movable Type’s user interface.

If you download the open-source Movable Type version, free support is available through their knowledge base and the user forums. If you purchase Movable Type, one year of support is included at no extra charge.

Concluding:

Typepad and WordPress are definitively leaders in the category of ease-of-use and support. Both have active discussion forums which form a solid support base. I would think the choice between the two platforms is a personal preference, though in general people report that WordPress is evolving much faster than Typepad/Movable Type.

Blogger definitely gets a minus on ease of use and support. I would advise a serious blogger only to look at Blogger if they have a solid technical knowledge, if they don’t mind experimenting, and want to spend time on the discussion forum when they run into problems.

As Tumblr only has limited functionality, and limited support with no active discussion forums, use it only if you want to do simple and easy stuff. I don’t consider Tumblr for a “professional blogger” or to be used for an organisation blog.

Writing this series, I got significant help from Dave Barnhart, who filled in the blanks on Typepad and Movable Type.
Dave is a social media strategy consultant, founder of Business Blogging Pros, and a gourmet chef. He and his firm have been helping companies use social media since 2005.
He blogs at Business Blogging Pros and Fumbling Foodie. Check out some of the blogs he has created.

So far, we have covered some basic questions before you can make a solid choice which blog platform to use: selfhosting your blog or not, what functionality you demand, and what ease of use and support you can expect.

With this triple pack, you can more or less decide on a blog software. Unless…, if you are into serious blogging, and you want your blog to become a piece of pride, a representation of you, or your organisation.
After all, you can write the best content you want, but if you don’t make it attractive and usable, your blog will attract little attention, and few visitors will stick.

This is where the next selection criteria lay:

How about layout, design and navigation

Some blog platforms offer you the pure bred blogs: A serial sequence of information snippits, or posts. This makes it difficult to find particular posts. The only navigation offered is to go through the posts page by page as if you were trying to find something in a reference book within a Table of Contents or Reference list.

Similarly, some blog platforms concentrate purely on the blog posts, with a few widgets and features, only allowing basic layout changes.

Other blog platforms are comparable to professional CMS (Content Management Systems), used to create large Internet websites. They offer all what is needed to turn a blog into a real Internet repository, while keeping the playfulness of a blog.

Your demands on flexibility and features in layout, design and navigation will determine your choice of blog platform. Let’s go over the different packages we have focused on so far…

Tumblr

We can be short here: Tumblr offers only a templates or themes, and virtually no widgets or plugins. The templates are fully customizable if you know how to play with HTML/CSS.

Unless if you know how to customize your template, you will never get anything close to what I would call ‘navigation’.
The search function on all my Tumblr-blogs broke a while ago, and after a few months trying to get support, I coded my own, using a Google search function. My experience with their support in this matter was… not good.

Post tagging or categories are virtually unused for navigation. Unless if you write it for yourself, there are no navigation features. A user will have to browse through the posts one by one.

Blogger

Blogger offers a limited range of predefined, and simple templates. It took forever before anyone made a three column template. They feature only a limited choice of widgets which can hardly be called “customizable”. You can integrate your choice of Google Gadgets, but most of these are not interesting or not working and without any technical support.

You have full access to modify your template file, whose features are well documented, allowing you to customize your layout at your own will, as long as you understand HTML/CSS and scripting.

Blogger’s navigation is the old fashioned type: you have to flip through blog pages one by one. It comes back onto my main criticism of Blogger: They have not added any features since over two and a half years (Google, are you listening?): Old fashioned serial navigation is what you will be stuck with, unless if you program your own into your template (as I did for my personal blog). They offer a search bar both as part of their top ‘Blogger’ tool bar, and one as a widget. But that is where it all ends.

They don’t know the concept of ‘static pages’ (e.g. the ‘about’ or ‘contact’ pages) neither, it is all left to you. If you are a HTML-savvy user, you can make your own.
They offer post tagging, and you could navigate using tags, but it is rather clumsy.

This makes a Blogger-blog a drag to navigate through posts. If you have a lot of posts, visitors will read one post, and then leave, rather than be encouraged to read others. Unless if you gather all your geeky skills and “do-it-yourself”..

WordPress

WordPress.com, one of the WordPress twins where your blog is hosted with them, offers a much wider range of templates, plug-ins and widgets than Blogger. They do not allow you to customize any of it, though. You can not use scripting or other advanced stuff in widgets or blogs.
Many themes allow you to change the colour scheme or the basic layout, but leave it at that. A sign at the door says: “No hacking -eh customization of themes- please” .

WordPress.org – the selfhosted brother- has much more widgets and templates to choose from, mostly free of charge, developed by an open source community. As it is PHP/MySQL based, a lot of themes, widgets and plug-ins spin off from the Drupal community, one of the best open source Content Management Systems (CMS) available on the market. WordPress.org leaves you full freedom to do what you want, so you can tweak your layout to your heart’s delight.

Wordpress.org has gathered that strong a market place that more and more people consider it as a contender for Drupal as a CMS, to design webpages, rather than blogs
This shows you WordPress’ strength. As the WordPress family is open source based, new features are being added at rocket speed.

WordPress offers a search bars as a widget or as part of a template. They offer static pages which are often very cleverly used in the free themes (or templates) they offer.

While you can tag a post with a keyword, you can also put it into a category, or a sub-category. E.g. I can tag a post with the keywords “Twitter” “microblogging” and “social media” but store it in the category “User Tips” together with the “Tips on how to use Blogger”. It will be featuring in the menu under “User Tips”.

The way WordPress implemented categories, allows the blog master to mimic something which comes very close to a webpage navigation. Some themes on offer – for free – use categories and sub-categories within dropdown navigation bars.
This is a real plus if you want to encourage people to browse through your blog, as if they were using a normal website. An absolute plus if you have a lot of posts.

Some WordPress themes have straightforward templates and style sheets which are easy to use and understand even for a beginner. Others are bewilderingly complex. If you think you may need to modify your blog’s templates, take a quick look at the styles.css file and a couple of the template pages to see if you can understand them before you decide to use that template.
Most third-party WordPress themes we used do NOT include support for printing and as a result printing a blog page gives you a multi-paged ugly mess.

Typepad/Movable Type

Both offer many options for navigation. They support categories in much the same manner at WordPress. Typepad builds a very nice horizontal menu bar into every theme. You can easily have menu bar items point to specific pages, posts, categories, or even other websites.

The appearance of your Typepad blog can easily be customized in most cases by simply uploading a new banner and entering some custom CSS. It is rarely necessary to modify the templates themselves.

Here is an example of how Typepad and Movable Type differ from WordPress: Let’s say you create a static pages titled “Explore our exceptional Services”. In WordPress that would be what appears on the menu bar as well.
In Typepad you can shorten that to just “Services” or “Exception Services” or anything you want.
Dave has a client with a blog that two women, Maya and Maureen, maintain together. He created two categories, ‘Maya’ and ‘Maureen’. The menu bar says ‘Conversations with Maya’ and ‘Conversations with Maureen’. Without hacking the templates you cannot do that with WordPress. In fact, in most templates if you create a static page it WILL appear on the menu bar.
Similarly, you may want to have a link to an external website on the menu bar. Piece of cake on Typepad. Gotta hack the template in WordPress.

Its selfhosted half-brother, Movable Type is used by many big names in the blogging world such as the Barack Obama campaign, Britney Spears, Boeing, Oracle, ABC, BBC, Huffington Post, and Sony Pictures. Movable Type’s template structure may be a little daunting for a beginning blogger.

Concluding:

If you are really serious about your layout, navigation and overall blog design, combined with a highly user-friendly design, WordPress.org and Movable Type/Typepad are your best choices.
Movable Type, though, is considered as too daunting for a first-time blogger who is not very tech-savvy.

If you have a lot of posts, and want to encourage your readers to really discover your blog while navigating through it, WordPress is a go, only to be beaten by Typepad/Moveable Type due to its flexibly configurable navbar.

I would keep Blogger only for those HTML-savvy bloggers who favour its full customizability.

Tumblr unfortunately does not score very high in this area due to the lack of navigation options, tags, working search functions, categories and design features.

Writing this series, I got significant help from Dave Barnhart, who filled in the blanks on Typepad and Movable Type.
Dave is a social media strategy consultant, founder of Business Blogging Pros, and a gourmet chef. He and his firm have been helping companies use social media since 2005.
He blogs at Business Blogging Pros and Fumbling Foodie. Check out some of the blogs he has created.

To make a solid choice which blog platform to use, we looked at factors like selfhosting your blog or not, what functionality you demand, ease of use and support as well as design, layout and navigation features.

Some bloggers are very particular about their tools, and want it just the way they like it, in looks and functionality. How do the different popular blog platforms compare on that criteria? How flexible are each of the software packages we looked at?

Tumblr

Tumblr’s template is a free-for-all playground, which you can customize all you want. The negative thing is the lack of features as part of their core functionality, so you can not do much more than tweak the layout.

Blogger

Blogger is highly customizable for those who have the technical knowledge. Over the past 20 months, I hacked my way through my personal blog’s template and what I have nowadays does not resemble the original anymore.
The way Blogger opened up its template for customizations, and documented the features is definitively a plus. On top of that, Blogger allows you to do whatever you want in HTML, Java scripting or CSS within widgets and posts. But… you need the technical know-how.

WordPress

You can recognize a WordPress.com blog – the hosted version of the WordPress twins – from afar. They feature more widgets and plug-ins than Blogger but they still… look pretty standard. Customization, unless if you pay extra for that privilege, is pretty much out of the question.

Not so for its bigger -and selfhosted- brother, WordPress.org, which allows you to do anything you want. And with the active user community being one of the strong points of the WordPress family, you can turn your blog into the look and feel of a professional website.

A few third-party providers of WordPress themes have protected their code so that certain portions are encrypted and cannot be modified, though this is rarer these days.

Typepad

… offers just as much customization as WordPress.org, with the same level of complexity. The two are about even here. Co-author Dave sets up blogs for a living and notes it is almost never necessary to modify the Typepad templates. Typepad also offers simple CSS customizations.

Movable Type

Selfhosted Movable Type offers just as much customization as WordPress.org, but is a little more bothersome due to the complexity of the underlying template architecture.

Concluding:

I recommend to go for Blogger only if you want to experiment.
Go for Movable Type or WordPress.org if you want to tweak your blog as you would do with a professional Content Management System (CMS), and if you have the knowledge. Even if you don’t, the out-of-the-box features are diverse and well-supported.

WordPress.com is the runner-up with a lot of features built-in, but with less customizability.
Tumblr offers you room to customize, but with only few featured building blocks.

Writing this series, I got significant help from Dave Barnhart, who filled in the blanks on Typepad and Movable Type.
Dave is a social media strategy consultant, founder of Business Blogging Pros, and a gourmet chef. He and his firm have been helping companies use social media since 2005.
He blogs at Business Blogging Pros and Fumbling Foodie. Check out some of the blogs he has created.

Making the choice which blog platform to use? Ask yourself: “Do I want to selfhost my blog or not?”, “What functionality do I want?”, “How important are ease of use and support, design, layout and navigation features and customizability for me?”…

Looking at all of these factors, here are my bottom line recommendations:

Tumblr:

- only for simple blogs or if you want to use it as a scratchpad for your Internet clips (which it does very well)
- limited functionality, few templates and widgets, minimum support and no active user-based discussion forums.
- can’t be used for self-hosted blogs

Blogger:

- Recommended if you want to stick to the “writing” part of blogging, and don’t care too much about layout and navigation.
- OR recommended if you are slightly geeky and want to customize your blog at your free will without much support – other than an active user forum – but also without many technical limitations.
- It has an older user interface, lacks features and does not seems to be a product which evolves anymore.
- Use only if your blog is to be hosted by them.

WordPress.com:

- Highly recommended for the more serious blogger who does not mind his blog to be hosted by WordPress
- easy to use, letting the user concentrate on blogging
- limits what the user can do in customizing posts, widgets and templates
- inability to embed Javascript
- wide range of templates and widgets
- good support through their technical services and the active user community forums
- a small selection of standard templates and widgets
- lack of ability to install plugins

WordPress.org:

- The top blogging platforms using selfhosting
- easy to use both for writing blogs and for its administrative functions
- has features close to what a professional Content Management Systems (CMS) will offer you.
- offers the largest range of widgets, plug-ins and templates any blog platform has.
- Is for free, unless if you want to pay for support on top of the help offered by a very active user community.
- Only to be used if you want to host it on your own (rented) server.

Typepad

- Only offers the option where your blog is hosted by them, but then again, is the top blogging platform offering more features than the others in its class.
- Easily customizable and configurable with a wide range of templates and options.
- Provides more advanced navigation features.

Movable Type:

- a top blogging platform though not evolving as fast as WordPress.org.
- Free unless if you want to pay for support
- To be hosted on your own server.
- Harder to configure and customize than the others, more difficult to use.
- Only recommended for professionals, with high demands.

Comparing blog platforms – further reading

While I mainly based this series on my personal experience and input from Dave (see frame below), I still want to offer a selection of interesting posts which go more in depth of the comparisons and features of the different blog softwares.

• Blogger or Wordpress?
• Self Hosting blogger
• Blogger vs Wordpress: Which is the best for SEO and how does self-hosting fit into the equation
• Wordpress.com versus wordpress.org
• Wordpress vs Blogger
• Blogger vs Wordpress Comparison chart
• The blog platforms of choice among the top 100 blogs
• Blogger vs Wordpress: which is better?
• Choosing a blogging platform
• Quick comparison about Wordpress, Tumblr Movable Type, Blogger and Drupal
• A narrative comparison of Typepad and Wordpress
• Comparison between Movable Type and Wordpress
• Comparison between Movable Type and Wordpress
• Blogger vs Wordpress vs Movable Type
• Choosing a blog platform
• Typepad versus WordPress versus WordPress.com

Writing this series, I got significant help from Dave Barnhart, who filled in the blanks on Typepad and Movable Type.
Dave is a social media strategy consultant, founder of Business Blogging Pros, and a gourmet chef. He and his firm have been helping companies use social media since 2005.
He blogs at Business Blogging Pros and Fumbling Foodie. Check out some of the blogs he has created.
I also had valuable help from Andy Wibbels, with thanks!