A blog is a great way to express your thoughts, create a web presence for your company and provide content to Internet users. If you’re planning to create a blog, but don’t wish to get into the
hassles of hosting, developing and deploying it yourself, consider
creating a blog at any of the free blogging platforms mentioned below.
Such services offer a plethora of features and generally come with both
free as well as paid plans.
Let’s look at the
top 10 most popular online blog-publishing services.
WordPress.com is perhaps the most feature-rich blogging service out there. It uses the popular open source web software
WordPress, and offers many features in its free version — traffic stats, anti-spam filters, SEO, gorgeous themes and more.
If you choose to use WordPress.com, you’ll be in good company, as many popular blogs — including
CNN’s Political Ticker,
People Magazine’s Style Watch and
Flickr — are on this platform.
If you need more than what the free version offers, you can opt for
their premium features that include custom domains, upgraded web hosting
resources and more. Whether you’re an expert blogger or a beginner, this ultimate blogging platform is a safe bet.
Blog.com is another popular WordPress-powered blogging platform. Just like other services, it has its own share of pros and cons. For a
start, it offers many beautiful premium themes in its free accounts, as
well as advanced plugins that one can expect only on a self-hosted
blog. However, on the downside, the free service displays more ads as
compared to WordPress.com. (But you can opt for paid upgrades to remove
the advertisements.) The free storage space offered on Blog.com is 2GB in the basic plan,
which is less compared to 3GB that WordPress.com gives its users.
Google Blogger is a well-known blogging service that offers many
features to its users. For example, Blogger comes with a Template
Designer user interface that lets you tweak your blog’s appearance as
much as you want. (However, the templates provided are, in my opinion,
no match compared to
WordPress themes.)
When it comes to ease of use, most beginners prefer Blogger as it
offers a no-nonsense interface for administering your blog and top-notch
integration with their Google account. Another great thing about
Blogger is that it offers certain great features for free that you
normally need to pay for in other blog-publishing services, most
noteworthy being the ability to set up
custom domains without paying a cent.
TypePad Micro is another free blog-publishing service. The interface
is easy to use, and you can import/export content from many other
blogging platforms. However, in terms of add-ons and themes offered, TypePad Micro won’t satisfy even the most basic blogger. The cheapest
paid plan begins at $8.95 per month and comes with additional themes, custom domain mapping, as well as technical support.
In an age where almost all blogging services are offering numerous
features in their free versions, TypePad Micro seems to be lagging
behind.
Jux is an innovative service that lets you easily share content
online. Conventionally speaking, it’s not a blogging service like the
ones previously mentioned, however, it has a lot of the same
functionalities. Rather, Jux lets you create your own
microblogging site for sharing your content. By default, Jux templates don’t have the native sidebars and other
widgets that are common to most blogs. Instead, Jux provides a clean
(and beautiful) approach to blogging. Simply create an account, and then
start sharing your content.
While Jux does seem amazing and has excellent support for mobile
devices, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. For instance, if you’re
planning to create a more conventional blog, opting for WordPress might
be a better option. On the other hand, if you’re leaning more towards
visual content, such as photos and artwork, Jux may just amaze you with
its features.
Tumblr is a popular and feature-packed microblogging platform. It
comes with many outstanding and interesting features such as audio
blogging (for sharing your music, for example), free custom domains,
hundreds of amazing blogging themes and more. Furthermore, you can sync your Tumblr account with Facebook and/or
Twitter so that you can update your social media feeds in a single
location. Yet another awesome feature is the ability to create
community-powered group blogs. Tumblr also offers support for many
third-party apps such as
Google Analytics and
Feedburner.
Posterous Spaces is an excellent online blog-publishing service that is similar to Tumblr.
Posterous Spaces has excellent privacy and viewing features so that
you can easily control who can see what on your Posterous Spaces site.
It’s designed to allow its users to post content quickly and as
hassle-free as possible, so it has loads of features included to
facilitate this, such as free mobile apps for
iOS and
Android smartphones so you can update your blog on the go and a simple, well-designed user interface. Using Posterous Spaces means you’ll be in good company; popular tech startups like
MailChimp,
TweetDeck and
Airbnb leverage Posterous as their company blog.
Blogetery is a WordPress-powered online blogging service that offers a
modest set of features. Free accounts get nearly 140 themes, custom
domain mapping and roughly 40 plugins to choose from.
On Blogetery, ads are displayed on all free blogs, but if you wish to
upgrade, you can opt for the paid plan that will cost you $3.50 per
month and will give you additional themes, plugins, email support, 5GB
of additional storage space, the ability to remove ads, etc.
Weebly offers more than just blogging — it’s a fully featured website
builder! Weebly’s blog manager features a drag-and-drop interface,
support for
image galleries,
slideshows, video/audio, maps, etc. Additionally, you can opt for their
Designer Platform that lets you build websites for your client, thereby effectively using Weebly as a
content management system.
LiveJournal (often abbreviated as LJ) offers blogging with a touch of
social networking to it. You can participate in polls, create networks
and interact with other LJ users alongside your blog.
With that said, the features, compared to other similar blogging
services, are nothing to brag about. Their collection of template is
decent, and plugins/extensions are pretty basic in nature.