Don’t panic, you don’t need any html skills or web designing knowledge. Blogging is as easy as 1-2-3. There are a few blogging platform to choose from, the current market leaders are Blogger, Wordpress and MoveableType. I would say that these three platform has the lion share in the blogging world and they are pretty easy to set up. Here is a brief guide:
Blogger
- Free hosting, unlimited bandwidth
- 300MB hosting space
- No unique domain name (e.g. your-name.blogspot.com)
- No plugins, limited features
- Central comment center to control spam
- Not quite search engine friendly
Wordpress
- Freeware, host in your own server
- Unique domain name (e.g. www.your-name.com)
- Tons of plugins, lots of feature
- Central comment center to control spam
- Tons of professional looking templates
- Search engine friendly
Wordpress Online
- Free, host in your own server
- No unique domain name (e.g. your-name.wordpress.com)
- limited plugins, limited features
- Central comment center to control spam
- A handful of professional looking templates
- Not quite search engine friendly
MoveableType
- Freeware, host on your own server
- Unique domain name (e.g. www.your-name.com)
- Lots of Plugins
- Central comment center to control spam
- Tons of professional looking templates
- Search engine friendly
For those that has no knowledge in computer or web designing, Blogger.com is the best platform around for beginners. It requires no setup, no coding skills or any other knowledge such as html. It is fairly a straight forward software made specially for beginners, whereas Wordpress and Moveable Type is the heavy duty version, they are packed with lots of feature and comes with some really nice, professional looking templates which can never be found in Blogger.com
Depending on your budget, if you’ve got the money and the desire to blog, then by all means get a paid hosting and host your own blog. The plus point in having your own domain name and hosting server is the ability to get a better ranking in Google Search Engine. Most search engine tend to shy away from free hosting server, even Google rank blogs from their own Blogger.com below others that has their own unique names.
If you are not sure about getting your own paid hosting plans, I would recommend you to try out this reliable hosting company 3iX, its a Singapore based hosting company and you get a 14 day trial. Unlike GoDaddy, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to install Wordpress, 3iX offers everything with a single click, yup, you can install wordpress with a single click, the only problem is nobody is going to update the software for you.