Starting Your Blog :: Choosing a Host

by Amy on November 20, 2009

So you want to start a blog and people are asking you which platform you’re planning on using but you’re not even sure what a platform is. Let’s start from the beginning. You want to get your content online and you’re not a web designer. You need a service to provide you with an interface to get you going and maintain your blog. There are many options and the industry is constantly evolving. I’m going to discuss some of the major questions here.

bloglogos

Let me first explain the difference between hosted (sometimes called: managed hosting) and self-hosted services.

Hosted
When you use a  hosted service your blog resides on the host’s server. Blogger, Typepad, Squarespace, Wordpress.com are all hosted services.

Pros of hosted sites: simplicity.

Cons of hosted sites: less control over CSS and HTML (these are acronyms for the coding languages that control the content and design of websites); some (Wordpress.com) do not support advertising; some do not support javascript in widgets (which limits functionality).

Self-Hosted
When you use a self-hosted platform your blog resides on your server. This means that you must pay a hosting service to host your blog.

Pros of self-hosted sites: full control over CSS and HTML; control over the way your posts are named in the address (this helps with search engines finding your blog or SEO); control over file storage and archiving; can be substantially less expensive than hosted sites.

Cons of self-hosted sites: can be intimidating or confusing to new bloggers.

Now for a discussion of the specific platforms.

Free (and hosted)
Blogger: As I mentioned in my last post (about pimping out your Blogger design), Blogger is free and popular mainly for that reason. I often recommend starting there because it’s easy. Why not get your blogging feet wet before you jump in all the way? What’s good about Blogger? It has a wizard to get you started in a matter of minutes. It’s run by Google (always a safe bet in my book). It allows you to put widgets (little bits of ready-made content) on the sidebars of your site. It supports comments and ads and has some nice-looking basic templates. Blogger also allows for domain mapping which means that you can use your own URL (address). You can either be: yourname.blogspot.com or if you have a name registered you can be yourname.com.

What are the cons of using Blogger? The biggest drawback to using Blogger is that it’s limited in its design capabilities. If you think you’d like to have many choices of templates or if you’re familiar with HTML or CSS and are going to want to have a highly-customized design, Blogger probably isn’t for you. Also, Blogger doesn’t support having ‘pages’ on your site. Pages are separate, named, areas in your site that can be viewed by search engines and help organize your site.

Wordpress.com: Wordpress.com is free and has most of the same pros and cons as Blogger, but I do think the learning curve is slightly steeper and if you really just want to be walked through the process from start to finish, you might prefer Blogger. Wordpress.com does support having pages on your site however.

Paid (and hosted)
What do I get if I use a paid platform? Services like Typepad and Squarespace are considered managed-hosting platforms. This means that they host your site and provide you with an interface to manage your blog. Both costs are included in their monthly fee. They offer tiered levels of service which come with different functions. The least expensive ones usually run less than ten dollars a month and offer somewhat limited space for your files and possibly less access to the customization parts of your site. I’m not sure it’s worth it to use a paid platform and use their entry-level package. If you’re going to go the paid route, go for the plan that lets you access your own HTML and CSS, as this is where the customization abilities lie. Also, if you plan on using lots of photos on your blog, you’re likely to burn through their minimum storage allotment pretty quickly. I recommend using the intermediate plan on most of these services. Only blogs with really high traffic and huge file storage needs will need to use the professional-level packages.

Do you recommend one over another? I have used Squarespace for my personal blog for over a year now. Partially because at the time I started it, Typepad was fiddling around with their software and I found their constant updating frustrating. It’s really a question of which interface you feel most comfortable with as they all have most of the same features. Squarespace does have a few drawbacks and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them here. First, they only allow one blog per account. With Typepad you can have multiple blogs. This might not matter to you, but if the ability is there to have multiple blogs, you might like to keep one just for showcasing photos of your kids for far-away relatives or a ‘practice’ blog to try out new designs on. Also, Squarespace’s ability to reply directly to comments is slightly cumbersome in comparison to Typepad’s. These things haven’t hindered how much I like the service though. They have superior customer service and beautiful design options. The prices are comparable.

Self-hosted
What about Wordpress.org? The reason I don’t lump Wordpress(.org) in with the others is that while it is a paid platform it’s self-hosted (in contrast to the free Wordpress.com platform). What this means for the user is that they have to contract a web host, however, the cost of a monthly web-hosting plan can be less than that a managed hosting service. I know this seems more complicated then going with a hosted platform and in truth it is—slightly. But if you’re a designer or like to play with HTML or CSS it’s worth it. I use Wordpress.org for all of the blogs that I design (unless otherwise specified by the client). Pros: thousands of high-quality templates; robust community for support; fully customizable; can be used as a complete content management system (CMS) for managing a website.

Are there other self-hosted options? Yes. SixApart (the company that owns Typepad) offers Moveable Type and there are others.

Bottom line
If you just want to test the waters and not invest any money go with Blogger or Wordpress.com. If you’re very comfortable with navigating the web and don’t mind a little more of a time investment, use Wordpress.com. If you want your hand held through the entire process, use Blogger.

If you’re planning on placing advertising on your blog or you have an interest or ability in accessing your site’s HTML or CSS or want more template choices, use a paid host. Which one? I recommend trying them out (most offer a free trial period) and getting a feel for which interface seems more user-friendly to you as this is purely personal preference. Also, compare costs as this is an investment.

If you’d just like to hand the reigns over to someone to get you up and running I have packages designed to get you online and blogging quickly and painlessly. All you’ll have to do is answer a few questions and provide me with any photos or design elements you’d like to incorporate and you’ll be on your way.

As always, please feel free to leave a comment or send me an email if you have any questions.

Up next: driving traffic to your blog.

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{ 5 comments }

Pimp my Blogger

by Amy on November 18, 2009

Despite some rather large design drawbacks, Blogger remains a popular blog platform among personal and hobby-bloggers. And for good reason—it’s free and easy to try out and many who start out there just stay with it. It’s simple to navigate and functionally it’s got all of the basics covered (i.e. widget ready templates, custom domain mapping, feed syndication, comment forms, spell-check, post-labeling and ad-ready). Where it does fall short is in it’s customization ability and lack of template choices. Having said all of that, the Minima template that comes ‘pre-installed’ (templates are available for download from external sites) in the Blogger interface can be tweaked into submission to create a personalized look—if you know how to do it. (Here are two examples of Blogger sites I designed recently for clients: Maggie & Josephine; By Needle and Thread.)

Today I’m going to show you how to add a background color or background image to your Minima template. Keep in mind however, that just because you can add a background image, doesn’t mean you should.

First, let’s get familiar with some of the basics of the Blogger interface. Log in and head to your ‘Layout’ palette. From there, click into ‘Edit HTML’. You’ll see this:

blogger

At the top, (highlighted here in yellow) you’ll see an underlined link that says ‘Download Full Template’. Do this first. Click the link and save your template somewhere in your computer. If you end up making a mistake during the process we’re about to go through, you can upload that file back to your Blogger account by copying and pasting and restore your original template.

Click inside the HTML window and you’ll see that you can scroll around. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a bunch of code that looks like this:

html

You can change your page background color by changing the hex color value (a hex color is a six-digit code assigned to a specific color that web browsers can read—you can find a chart here) in the background-color value spot. Be sure to leave the pound sign (#) in there. I usually just copy and paste exactly where the numbers are that I want to substitute, that way there’s less chance that I’ll take out a valuable piece of code.  In the above example I’ve replaced Blogger’s default background-color with #666666 (a dark grey) and saved the template, and my site looks like this:

Screen shot 2009-11-17 at 4.47.54 PM

because ‘background-color’ refers to the entire page.

Now what we need to do is change the interior page color to something easy to read text on. (Insert unsolicited opinion here: there is almost never a good time to have your main text column not on a white background. If the point of your blog is to have people read what you’re writing, then please make it easy for people to actually read.)  I’m going to go with white (#ffffff). So scroll down inside the HTML window until you find the code that looks like this:

#outer-wrapper {
width: 660px;
margin:0 auto;
padding:10px;
text-align:$startSide;
font: $bodyfont;
}

(yours might be slightly different but basically you’re looking for #outer-wrapper and what comes after it).

Add a line before the “}” tag, add the following code (where ffffff is the six-digit hex color for your color choice):

background-color:#ffffff;

save your template. Now my site looks like this:

Screen shot 2009-11-17 at 8.59.14 PM

If you understand the basic structure of a Blogger site you can apply those changes to any of the elements to make a custom design.

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For example, if I wanted my sidebar to be light gray I would find the #sidebar-wrapper code and add a background-color of #cccccc; and I get this:

Screen shot 2009-11-17 at 9.05.35 PM

Now that you get the general idea, you can apply a background image to your site. For this to work, you must have an image hosting account like Flickr or Picasa. Since you’re on Blogger, you already have a Picasa account because that’s where Blogger stores the images for your blog. Upload the image you want to use to your image hosting account and locate the ‘absolute url’. This is the web address of the image. Once you have found it, copy and paste it into your computer’s memory.

Now find the code in your HTML that looks like this:

body {
background:$bgcolor;
margin:0;
color:$textcolor;
font:x-small Georgia Serif;
font-size/* */:/**/small;
font-size: /**/small;
text-align: center;
}

and add

background-image: url(enter your url here);

Now my site looks like this:
Screen shot 2009-11-17 at 9.25.48 PM
Depending upon the image you use you may need to add one or both of the following lines of code:

background-repeat: repeat;

or

background-attachment: fixed;

Or you can hire me to do it for you.

Next up: choosing the right blog platform for your needs.

  • Google Reader
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  • Delicious
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Digg
  • Gmail
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  • Share/Bookmark

{ 12 comments }

In the Beginning

November 11, 2009

Hi. I’m Amy and I design blogs and websites. I’ve been doing it for a long time and one of my favorite things about what I do is being able to help friends and family with their web and design projects. I’m the person in my family who gets the call when someone has a [...]

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