Choosing The Best Blogging Platform

For a new blogger, one of the greatest confusions is to choose the best blogging platform. In this post I won’t go deep into comparing the several blogging platforms out there – instead I’ll let you know the advantages of a “Self Hosted WordPress Blog”.

There a several reasons why I believe WordPress is the best blogging platform out there in the market. The features are galore such as plugins, themes, ease of use, a great community and excellent support. And most importantly the product itself as a free open-source blogging platform.

As I said I won’t go deep into comparing different blogging platforms or what WordPress is, I’ll quickly proclaim the advantages of switching over to wordpress.

1. Ease of Use – Getting used to WordPress and understanding the framework for a beginner can be quite quick. Although for the initial days it might be a little hard time as you might get confused with the hundreds of thousands of plugins available. I suggest you to play with it for a few days and try some plugins and finally select which ones suit your needs the best. You even have incorporated drag and drop widgets to enhance your blogging experience.
2. Suitable for both newbies and Gurus – For a normal blogger, WordPress is not only easy to use, but if you’re a developer/programmer then take my word – “Wordpress is one of the most advanced and powerful software”. For advanced users, WordPress has provided us with “Hooks” which allow your plugin to ‘hook into’ the rest of WordPress; i.e. to call functions in your plugin at specific times, and thereby set your plugin in motion.
3. Free Lifetime updates – Well if there’s one word which excites us a lot is the word “FREE” and that’s what wordpress is. Not only it is free, there is a very lively group of advanced coders behind wordpress who constantly keep adding features to the platform and the upgrades are also free as well. There are many blogging platforms which may ask for a couple of hundred dollars either as initial setup cost or for lifetime upgrades but may only provide the basic blogging essentials like posting a blog post, post tagging and comment system.
4. Plugins – Along with wordpress, you come equipped with hundreds of thousands of plugins to add functionality to your blog, without even touching the core files. The only thing is don’t overcrowd your blog with plugins. I advise you to add plugins which you think are the most important. You can select your plugins from the wordpress plugins database and configure them from the settings page at just the click of a button. There are some paid plugins as well.
5. Free Templates – Not to mention, there are thousands of Templates which are contributed by users to the community. You can also buy some templates with advanced SEO and hell lot of features and customizations for a few dollars. Themes can also be set at just a click of a button and later you can configure it to your needs.
6. Spam Prevention – This is one of the greatest reasons why most of the bloggers choose wordpress is because of its powerful spam prevention system provided by Akismet. Akismet provides an API Key which can filter out legitimate comments from the automated comments done by internet robots. So with wordpress, you can easily keep spammers away from flooding your blog.
7. A Lively Community – I can say that WordPress has the best community. It is one of the reasons why experienced bloggers choose wordpress rather than any other blogging platform. You should always use software which has a huge community behind it. You can rest assured that WordPress is easy to use, simple, secure and powerful.