Blog sites

Part of this assignment is to look at other blog hosting sites, to compare and contrast.  Blogger is the site we were required to use, and at the very least it keeps us all easily linked.

Having looked at a few different options I personally wouldn’t have chosen Blogger, but saying that I haven’t actually created a blog on the other sites I looked at so they may not be as good as they look…..

Wordpress.com was the one I was most impressed with.  The Home page is clean and nicely presented (although maybe a little cluttered), however one of my pet hates with websites is having to scroll down to see the whole page, so that’s a minus point. 

You can view existing blogs without having to sign up, which is great as you can get a real feel for what you can do with it.

There are Free Features and also Premium Features, but the free features are plenty for the general blogger.  I also noticed that there is no lock-in, so if you decide to leave you can remove all of your content.  I wasn’t able to find this stated obviously with the other sites I looked at.

Another thing I noted which might go against them was ‘To support the service we may occasionally show ads on your blog, however we do this very rarely. You can remove ads from your blog for a low yearly fee.’  I wonder what their definition of ‘very rarely’ is?

TypePad.com is another site which I looked into.  Again the Home page is easy to read, although there is a lot less content.  The Features tab lists all that they offer, but going across to the Pricing shows that it costs from $8.95 per month. 

You can take the option of using TypePad Micro, and this gives something that looks somewhat similar to Blogger.

The only way to look at existing blogs is with the Showcase, but this only brings up a selected example and only in a pop-up window which is a shame.

One thing that I did like was that you can add a ‘tip jar’, to let your readers show their appreciation, quirky!

Thirdly I looked at Tumblr.com, and really didn’t like it.  There is no real way to find out information easily, the layout is horrible, more stumblr to be honest.  I can’t muster the enthusiasm to say much more other than, if I was looking for somewhere to have a blog they wouldn’t be the one!

I realise that the write up I have given Tumblr is a lot less than the others, but there simply isn’t anything else I can say, it isn’t a nice site to look through and nothing about it was easy or made me want to look further.  For me, if I was to choose where to have my blog, Wordpress wins hand down.