Over the past few months, I have spent a lot of time setting up this website, choosing softwares to use, customizing the look and feel of site, researching how to publicize (and potentially monetize) the website content and so on. So I am planning to do a small series of posts sharing with all of you things that I discovered/learnt in the process so that it can be put to use by more people, especially those who are new entrants to the blogosphere.

Assuming that you have already decided what area to blog on, the next thing you need to figure out is what are the right tools/platforms for you to choose in order to meet your blogging needs. This is what I am going to cover in this first post of the series.

Before you get started with blogging, you need figure this out first - should you use existing blog websites like blogger.com, wordpress.com or should you have your own website with self/customized installation of blogging software? There are certain advantages/disadvantages of both the approaches:

Option I : Hosting on sites like blogger or wordpress.com

Advantages

• It’s Free
• Get up and running in no time
• No technical expertise needed, no software to install
• No need to worry about security, backups
• The blogs are likely to be optimized for search engines
• The sites like blogger are hosted on robust load balanced infrastructure so it can take very high load

Disadvantages

• Enhancing the functionality of your website beyond what the blog provider offers is difficult
• Though sites like blogger and wordpress.com give you a lot of templates for user interface, there would be occasions when you’d feel you don’t have complete control over it
• Since entire blog setup is taken care of, you don’t get to know how it works behind the scenes

Option II : Self install on your own web host

Advantages

• Complete control over environment, infrastructure and hosting options. (Another positive side-effect of custom hosting is that you can use the website for more than just for blogging, but that’s slightly besides the point)
• Complete control over branding of the website
• If you choose a open source software like wordpress.org, you can modify it the way you like to add a feature that’s unique to your site!
• You can leverage plugins (and there are tons of them) to enhance and add additional functionality to your website
• You can decide when/how to backup your website
• Solutions like wordpress.org have great online community so if you need any advice or face any issue the help is not far away

Disadvantages

• You need to pay for hosting your website
• You need to have some technical experience in order to install the software, schedule backups, keep your site secure etc
• If your blog makes it to the front page of digg, that can generate enough traffic to affect the performance of your website

(Just to make sure that it’s not confusing - wordpress.com is a site that let’s users register and host their blogs - very similar to blogger.com, while wordpress.org is the site where you can download the open source “engine” that runs behind the scenes)
As you can see, there is no one solution that fits all. In a nutshell, the more control you want, more the reasons that you should consider having your own hosting, but only you can make that call.

For this website, I went for the opensource blogging software from wordpress.org, and so far I am really happy with it. Here are some benefits which make custom installation worth it:

• I can use plugins to enhance the features of the sites. There are tons of them available here for things like search engine optimization, generating sitemap, placing Ads on your website, better formatting, performance enhancements, backups, you name it!
• There are many great looking templates available at Wordpress theme directory. The theme that I use however is completely customized as per what I wanted it to look like.
• Since this is an open-source product, I have the option to modify the code as I like it. But the software is designed in such a way that in most cases I can add new features to it by either using existing plugins or writing my own like this one and then optionally sharing it with the community!
• One good side effect of handling things like search engine optimization, backups, customizing UI (i.e the things I would have gotten for free had I used blogger) is that it requires me sharpen some of my technical skills which can be beneficial in long run!

That said, I would again like to emphasize that you only can decide which option is best for you - there are no rights or wrongs here. Hope this post helps you decide which option is right for you.

In the next posts, I will put together my views on best practices for design/UI aspects of the blog, branding your website, publicizing your content and monetization opportunities. Until then, please do let me know your opinions and feedback on this post so that I can make the future posts in this series more informative.

Update: Other posts in this series:

Part II : Tips on Good User Interfae Design