I'd say there are four main components to consider when starting a simple dynamic website, like a blog:
- What software it will run on
- Where that software/website will be hosted (whose computer will be running the software, doing the actual serving of your website's pages to visitors)
- What your website's "domain name" will be (e.g. www.google.com, www.news24.com)
- The "theme", the design of your site.
Once you have these components in place, you get to focus on the most important component: the actual content.
There is some interplay between these components. For example, the theme/design must be integrated into the software the site will be running on, and the "host" must allow running that particular software.
To keep a site operational, the site's software must sometimes be upgraded for bug fixes and security fixes. Choosing a general website hosting service may require some extra work in keeping the software up to date. This is what makes certain services attractive, for example the two big blog hosting sites: Blogger or WordPress.com. These two hosting services will host your blog for you. "Blogger" consists of both the hosting service and the software. WordPress.com is a free hosting service that runs the WordPress software. So both of these options take care of the first two of the four components above. You typically pick a theme out of a relatively large selection, and you usually get to customize theme images (e.g. a header image, see the top of this blog) and some other style sheet elements. Then you provide the content.
So what about domain names? Typically a Blogger or WordPress.com blog will be hosted as subdomains in the blogspot.com or wordpress.com domain. For example, for "My New Blog" I might choose mynewblog.blogspot.com or mynewblog.wordpress.com. This does not look particularly professional though. You can also host your blog with Blogger or WordPress, but attach your own domain name to it, at a small fee. Blogger can help you for $10 per year, while WordPress.com will do it for $15 per year.
Generally, I prefer WordPress. I don't like Blogger's commenting system much. And most of my friends prefer WordPress as well.
Hosting Your Own
Hosting with Blogger or WordPress.com does come with some limitations though. For flexibility, finding your own independent host and installing the WordPress software gives you much more power over your website. Some of the trade-offs are described in WordPress.com vs WordPress.org, where WordPress.org represents the software you can install on your own independent host. Noticing, during research for this post, that you can use your own domain name on a WordPress.com hosted blog, I'm beginning to wonder why I shouldn't advise people to go with that option? Why not?
- You will need to buy extra web space to host mp3's (WordPress.com comes with 50MB by default. UPDATE: that's an old quota, in a comment below Johan says WordPress.cpm now grants 1GB?). Photos can be hosted on flickr, videos on YouTube... what about mp3's then? Isn't there any nice mp3 hosting service?) Actually, the page Running out of space? makes one uncertain if they ever permit uploading mp3 files, even though the page that links there makes it sound possible.
- Flexibility: installation of interesting plugins or commenting systems and the like is not possible on a WordPress.com hosted blog.
- WordPress.com limits what can be done with regards to the blog theme/design.
- Apparently WordPress.com reserves the right to display ads on your blog (according to the bottom of the Features page). Has anyone ever seen them do this? I'm not talking about a blogger running ads on his or her own site, and making money from that. I'm talking about WordPress.com ads, them making money, to support the free service.
OK, what did I miss? This is all in effort of advising Prophet (Theo Geyser and Koos van der Merwe), who I hope will soon be a wonderful new voice on the South African blogosphere.
14 responses so far ↓
1 Johan // Sun Aug 3 23:33:43 2008
Hmm...as ek dit reg het, kry 'n mens 'n gig spasie by Wordpress.com.
2 Hugo // Sun Aug 3 23:59:33 2008
Dis nuut. Wel, die link bo is vir Desember 2006, wat "nuut" maak "iewers in die afgelope 20 maande".
3 Linda // Mon Aug 4 00:34:01 2008
Hi Hugo!
I have no technical advice (It all boggles [or is it 'googles' ^_^] my mind), but I have some content advice from a friend's blog:
http://www.thembtiblog.com/2008/07/my-case-for-joining-blogosphere-plus.html
She includes the list "15 compelling reasons to start blogging" from Scott Ginsberg's blog:
http://hellomynameisscott.blogspot.com/2008/07/15-compelling-reasons-to-start-blogging.html
4 Hugo // Mon Aug 4 00:40:46 2008
OK, according to http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/12/24/how-do-i-get-music-on-my-blog/ , you still need to do a space upgrade to be able to upload mp3s, even though according to http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/about-the-space-upgrade/ the default space available is now 3GB. The upgrade (to 5GB and to allowing mp3 uploads) is apparently $20 per year.
5 Charl Botha // Mon Aug 4 09:10:22 2008
I host all my Wordpress blogs (4 of them at the last count) on a single ANhosting (google it) account. This costs me 12 * 7 == $ 84 per year, but in return I get gigabytes of disc space (currently you get 500G, that should be enough for a few MP3s), terabytes of bandwidth (5 TB) and the ability to host a number of domains.
What's really useful, is that they have a thing called Fantastico, with which one can install and upgrade Wordpress literally by clicking twice in the hosting control panel.
6 Hugo // Mon Aug 4 21:18:47 2008
Thanks Charl. If my homebrewn mengelmoes doesn't grow to the point where it is ready to pick up the slack when thinktoomuch.net needs a new home, I'll consider ANhosting.
7 Linda // Tue Aug 5 01:05:53 2008
I have a techie question for you. I use Blogger for my blog but agree that the commenting system is not good.
If I were to switch to WordPress, would I lose all of my contents that I worked hard to set up? Is there any way to transfer all of that?
Is that a stupid question?
8 Hugo // Tue Aug 5 19:27:30 2008
No, it is a good question. People often put some effort into migration.
I Googled for <em>wordpress blogger migrate</em> and found a number of good results. For example:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content
And another little tutorial that looks good, but old: 2006. It isn't talking about "New Blogger". In fact, the tutorial talks about itself not supporting "Blogger Beta", which I'm sure later became "New Blogger"...
http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpress
It does give some idea of things you could consider though, if you care about things beyond just your content.
9 Hugo // Tue Aug 5 19:37:21 2008
There I shared the first and fourth links that came up in my search. The third seems good, despite the self-aggrandizing name:
http://www.mamablogga.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-migrating-from-blogger-to-wordpress/
The second (on my search anyway) is also outdated.
10 Johan // Sun Aug 17 00:25:19 2008
Linda - Wordpress het 'n wonderlike funksie wat jou instaat stel om jou Blogger-blog te import en te convert na Wordpress.
Wordpress is werklik die beste blogging software op die planeet, al is dit net omdat dit opensource is, professioneel aangepak word en baie gereeld opgedateer word.
WordCamp!!!
muwhahahaha
11 Linda // Thu Aug 21 02:47:03 2008
Thanks, Hugo!
I checked out WordPress to see if I really would prefer it, and although the comment-function works better on WordPress, I found Blogger to be much more user friendly as far as posting and customizing go... Or maybe I'm just used to it. I did get my own domain name, though. Thank you for that suggestion. I didn't know that it was so inexpensive.
And can you please tell me what Johan said??? He was addressing me, correct? :-) I take it that he likes WordPress better as well?
12 Hugo // Thu Aug 21 10:21:36 2008
Posting and customizing you say... Maybe I should check blogger out again to see what more user-friendly posting looks like.
13 Johan Swarts // Thu Aug 21 20:33:43 2008
My apologies, Linda!
I basically said that Wordpress can import many different kinds of blogs (including Blogger) with the click of a button.
And yes - I love Wordpress :-)
14 Hugo // Thu Aug 21 22:42:54 2008
Oh, and oops/sorry Linda, that I neglected to answer your question. Must have been in a rush at the time, must have slipped through the cracks in my mind. ;)
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