FlikTeoh.com http://flikteoh.com Web Design, Mobile Phones and SEO Thu, 20 May 2010 06:27:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Choosing the right Blogging Platform http://flikteoh.com/blog-seo/choosing-blogging-platform.html http://flikteoh.com/blog-seo/choosing-blogging-platform.html#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 11:40:05 +0000 FlikTeoh http://flikteoh.com/?p=224

Choosing the right Blogging Platform

Choosing the suitable blogging platform can be a head ache sometimes without a proper guidance. Should we use Blogger or should we use WordPress? Should we get a personal domain hosted blog or a free hosted blog? Which one is better? There are often a lot of question popping into your mind before you actually get anything started.

Before we go into making the final decision, I’d like to break this down into several question and answer form of explanation to help you further understand the pros and cons of each. At the same time helping you to plan out your blogging journey, just like how everyone would plan for their business before it begins.

If you are landed into this blog for the question above, please find that I’d mostly be talking about Blogger and WordPress as my recommended blogging platform. I’m not saying that WordPress or Blogger are the best blogging platforms, but to my experience, they are at least the most reliable to me.

First of all, ask yourself these question:

  1. Are you planned on any budget?
  2. Are you planning on doing this as long term or temporal interest basis?
  3. Are you writing it as your hobby or for some professional reasons?
  4. Are you planning to put advertisement on your blog or writing paid reviews?


You should be having the answers to the above question in your mind by now. So let me just go through each pros and cons of both the above suggested blogging platforms.

Are you planned on any budget?

There are many free hosted blogging services offered over the web, if you planned on using a free service such as Blogger or WordPress.

Pros of using Blogger as your free blogging platform:

  1. Low Cost: Well, it’s pretty obvious since you’re getting free platform, free sub-domain, free hosting but unless you later on decide to spend some money getting some professional done templates.
  2. Income: Blogger allows you to place advertisements on your blog as you may like to. Since Blogger is a service from Google, I’d take it as Google Adsense would work best with it specially if you’re writing a niche blog.
  3. Easier Search Engine Ranking: Since the actual domain name is so highly ranked, it would eventually help in easier obtaining high Search Engine Rank.

Cons of using Blogger:

  1. Limitation of Controls: You’ll have limited features and controls over the blog as it is hosted by the provider. You’re also bound to their Terms of Service.
  2. Least-Professionalism: Your blog will be hosted under a sub-domain of the service provider thus making it to look less professional on the URL.
  3. Risk of Getting Remove: As your blog is hosted under the service provider, sometimes the topic you posted might have violated any of their Terms of Service that you’re not aware of and thus risking your blog with months of posts getting removed.


Pros of using WordPress(free hosted on WordPress.com):

  1. Low Cost: Just as the same like the above, you’ll be getting a free sub-domain, free platform, and free hosting. They also have quite a number of themes to choose for.
  2. Auto Upgrades: Since WordPress is hosting on their WordPress MU(multi user) platform, most the upgrade works are done automatically by the service provider when there happens to be any updates available.
  3. Easier Search Engine Ranking: WordPress being known as one of the most powerful blogging system has been quite highly ranked on most of the major search engine, thus easier for their sub-domains getting better Search Engine Ranking.

Cons of using WordPress:

  1. Limitation of Controls: You only get to choose the themes they offered in their service and there are no ways of customizing the layouts if you need to.
  2. Least-Professionalism: I guess I don’t have to explain about this again for getting hosted under a sub-domain.
  3. Limitations: WordPress.com does not practise earning incomes through blogging on their platform, thus you don’t get to put any advertisements if you’re blogging with WordPress.


Now, the above should have help you to decide which platform to go for if you planned for a zero-budget blogging.

Self Domain Hosted WordPress:

If the above still doesn’t help you to make your decision, here’s the last suggestion and probably the best I’d suggest you to do.

Pros:

  1. Most Powerful Blogging Platform: WordPress has been known as the most powerful blogging platforms by their constant updates and improvements. Hundreds of thousands of bloggers on the blogsphere has started to switch into using WordPress. It is packed with great features from writing your contents, publishing photos, and even being used as a powerful CMS(Content Management System) for some companies. WordPress is built with SEO-friendly in mind which plays the most important part of World Wide Web.
  2. Full Controls: You have total controls on your site designs and features. You can even add in some useful snippets or plugins provided from the world wide developers. You’ll find the potential of expanding your blog when you start to know more when using WordPress
  3. Friendly SEO built: WordPress is built with SEO-friendly in mind to help providing more good quality contents for the World Wide Web. It is also easier to learn and practise better SEO technique with the use of WordPress.
  4. Incomes: Since you’re hosting it personally, you’re not bound to any terms of use. You’re free to even place advertisements on anywhere you’d like on your blog to help generate you some income.

Cons:

  1. Managing Updates: If you’re not a tech savvy person, you’ll see the pain on upgrading whenever there’s a new version of WordPress released or whenever there are new versions of plugins available. You might even end up having to pay someone to do it for you.
  2. Cost: Well, since you decided to host it on personal domain, of course there will be some fees to it. If you’re not on a tight budget, a simple shared hosting package wouldn’t really be a problem for you then.
  3. Hosting Issues: Some web hosting companies might always have problems with their server not being stable or they provide lousy services and you only start to realize after you’ve made the purchase.


Conclusion:

Based on my past experience, I’ve listed out almost everything I can think of. I certainly hope that the above info would guide you to making the right decision on which blogging platform to use. Just as you might ask, this blog is self-hosted using WordPress platform.

Good Luck and I’m hoping to see as you proceed to my next post on Choosing the Right Theme.

]]> http://flikteoh.com/blog-seo/choosing-blogging-platform.html/feed/ 0 Going through a full revamp! http://flikteoh.com/personal/going-through-a-full-revamp.html http://flikteoh.com/personal/going-through-a-full-revamp.html#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:16:30 +0000 FlikTeoh http://www.flikteoh.com/personal/going-through-a-full-revamp.html Yep, it’s going through another full revamp!

If you’re coming from the search engine or followed a link to this site. You’d probably not reach the result you were looking for.

The site owner decided to trash his 147 posts and start from a fresh site and blog. It was a hard decision to make. To keep up with his work and profile, the decision has been made. Till then, hang in there! I’ll be right back!!

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