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Which Blog Will Change Your Business?

WordPress

“Blogs Will Change Your Business.” Or so the May 2nd, 2005 issue of Business Week stated, but which blogging software should you use?

Undoubtedly, web publishing in the form of blogging has gained popularity as a legitimate business, communications and marketing tool. Furthermore, any internet web manager, developer, designer or digital media industry professional who is worth their weight should maintain a blog, apparently. I myself finally got around to setting up my new blog using WordPress. So… why a new blog? And why have I chosen the blogging software that I have?

Well, having been online since 2000, the blog that I used to maintain was updated sporadically at best, the capabilities of the blog were cumbersome and customisation was extremely limited. Two degrees later, a number of years industry experience and not to mention the changing nature of the digital media landscape itself had me wanting to create a fresh, new, clean-slate kind of blog. Furthermore, despite the fact that my current hosting company, Go Daddy, offers their own QuickBlog system, I decided that I wanted more options than what was on offer. There are a number of other hosted blogging services available, such as TypePad, Blogger and LiveJournal. However, I decided that the benefits of a self-hosted blogging package would outweigh the drawbacks of maintaining my own blog installation. After some research (and assessing what blogging software fellow industry people/ those that I admire were using) I narrowed my choices down to 3: Movable Type, WordPress and TextPattern.

On first impressions, I preferred the Movable Type website. However, as Dustin Diaz notes in his own blog, “One should never choose one software over the other based soley on the look of it. I basically got the impression that the classier the UI, the better the functionality must be. Surely a first class design means first class development tools. Wrong”.

So, I dug a little deeper and did my homework. Some help with this included reading an excellent article on the Site Point website, “Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed“, which “assesses the performance of the most popular self-hosted options as they go head to head in the battle to become *your* chosen blog software.”

So, who won the battle to become *my* chosen blog software?
- WordPress.

The reasons for this were that WordPress was the best fit for managing static content through the same interface as dynamic content. WordPress also seemed to have the most flexibility in its configuration options, an extensive support community with additional plugins available, permalink flexibility, easy categorisation of content and was very easy to setup (more on this below). There’s no doubt that the different types of blogging software have their own strengths and weaknesses, WordPress just turned out to be the right fit for me.

So, I put the famous ‘5-minute install‘ for the blogging software to the test. On first attempt (3 weeks ago) I gave up after 15 minutes! What can I say?!? It was certainly no reflection on the WordPress software or installation instructions but more to do with my frame of mind at the time - One hundred and one things to do in work, having database connection problems with my host, trying to organise a holiday and subsequently, being in very bad need of that holiday! So… cut to three weeks later - back from the holiday (Sweden & Denmark… hopefully I’ll have more to write about these locations in a future post) and back to the WordPress install. The ‘5-minute install’ took 3 minutes! Happy days. :)

So, which is the ‘right’ blogging software to use? Well, there is no one ‘right’ package. Some blogging software will suit certain situations better than others. The most suitable choice for me was WordPress, the most suitable choice for you might be something else. Regardless, whatever blogging software you choose should be the one that optimises the productivity of your web publishing. Content really is king afterall!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 6:29 pm and is filed under internet, blogs, marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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