Where Should You Put Your Blog?

In yesterday's post, I talked about setting up a blog ahead of your new website's launch date. Doing this helps you boost awareness of the website, gets your customers and clients in the habit of visiting, and can give additional value to the link from your blog to your website.

Basically, though, you can only do this if your blog is separate from your main site.

If you use Blogger, you can upload your blog to the site once it's up. "Put Your Blogger Blog On Your Website" gives you step by step instructions for doing so. You can also have it on its own domain and link it up nicely. If you prefer Wordpress, you can install it into your website.

If you start your blog at some other place, then you can still copy and paste it into your website later, but I don't see any reason to do so. There are lots of nice places for personal blogs and webpages. Here are my entirely subjective views on the main choices of free blogging platforms for personal use:

• Hardest to use if you don't write html: bravenet and zerocatch
• Coolest: weebly and spruz
• Most elegant pre-made themes: edublogs and squarespaces
• Worst pre-made themes: zerocatch and wikispaces
• Best wizards: tripod and edublogs
• Easiest to get started: terapad and xanga
• Most irritating to use: blogspot and livejournal

This has nothing to do with making a blog for your business, though. We're not talking here about fun. Serious work-related blogging pretty much has to be Blogger or Wordpress.

Since I blog for lots of people all over the web, I've used many different blogging platforms. Some are more to my taste than others, but all of them work. What I always say is, "Wordpress, Notepad, Blogger, Word, Dreamweaver, pointy sticks on clay tablets.... it's all the same to me."

You might be more exacting than I am.

Therefore, I went around the web to see what the more discriminating bloggers had to say about the difference between Blogger and Wordpress.

The first thing you have to know is that people who are making serious, well-researched comparisons between the two are always comparing Blogger with the paid version of Wordpress.

Given that, the comparisons boil down to this:

• When you blog at Blogger, Google owns your content.
• Blogger is easier if you don't have much tech training.
• Wordpress is more flexible if you don't have much tech training.
• Wordpress has higher prestige if you do.

I therefore have two suggestions for you if you're trying to decide between the two:

• Set up a free account at each and see how you personally like it. I find that I have to spend a lot of time in the html editor at Blogger to get it to do just what I want, but many people find that surprising. I was surprised to find that Wordpress is considered hard to use. Much of this is personal preference.
• Visit the links in the third paragraph above and read the instructions for putting each into your website and see which sounds easier to you.

If you've already arranged for your blog to be integrated into your website, then you'll probably have to wait till it goes live before you can do much blogging.

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