Building a Better Blog

For anyone with a 'simple' 'blog project seems like there are two questions that always need to be answered:

1.) Which software to use?

2.) How to do this as inexpensively as possible?

As to question #1 (software), I fully admit a bias toward Drupal, but I will try to give a somewhat objective overview of your choices.

For a detailed discussion with a fairly extensive list of choices, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog_software

Broadly, blogging software comes in two categories: "User Hosted," which means you run the software on your own server (like Drupal), or "Developer Hosted," meaning the software runs on servers provided by the creator of the software (like Blogger.com).

The trade-off between the two is pretty much what you'd expect: User Hosted software give you much more control in how you can tweak, customized, or extend your site. The advantage of Developer Hosted solutions is that they are often free of charge (usually via ad support), and you don't have to think about issues of server administration or hosting accounts.

But with Developer Hosted software, someone else makes most of the choices for you, and ultimately your blog is at their mercy. (What happens if they decide to shut down the service tomorrow?) For this reason, I suggest the User Hosted route for any blog which is intended to be a long term business asset.

Note also that some software is available in both forms, the most famous example being Wordpress, for which you can get a blog hosted for you on wordpress.com, or you can download the software and install it on your own server for complete control. Since you can export your content form a wordpress.com site, this might be a good compromise to allow you to get online as quickly and cheaply as possible, while allowing the possibly of moving to your own hosting in the future.

Besides Drupal and Wordpress, there really aren't many other options I'd consider to be worth exploring. Joomla can be tempting as a middle-of-the-road solution between ease of use and extensibility, but if you're planning to grow your site beyond 'just a blog,' you might as well go with a better development framework like Drupal.

For use as a blogging tool, there is a lot of overlap between Drupal and Wordpress, but generally I would say that Wordpress is more focused on blogging specifically, whereas Drupal is more focused on extensibility for all kinds of websites, so it's out-of-the-box blogging features might seem more simplistic, but it will allow you greater flexibility in the future.

So if you want to pick between the two, the best you can do is to try them out. You can get your hands on Wordpress by simply signing up an account on wordpress.com .

Many web hosting services provide 'Fantastico' which can make it easy to do a quick Drupal set-up for try-out purposes. (However, I don't recommend Fantastico for running a real Drupal site.)

For a view from the reader perspective, I've set up a Drupal demo site with blogging and a number of related features enabled:

http://www.mattchapmanproductions.com/demo/

That site took me about an hour to set-up in Drupal. Of course, you should plan to spend more time if you're new to Drupal and planning to do it yourself. This brings us to Question #2, on minimizing costs.

Obviously if you can accept the inherent limitations, a hosted service like blogger.com or wordpress.com will reduce your set-up costs to nothing.

But the bigger costs in launching a web site these days is not the site building itself, but the custom design, initial training, and on-going technical support. All of these can also be reduced to very little, if you have more time than money:

-Design: Use a free, stock theme.

Check out Drupal Themes at
http://drupal.org/project/themes (directory of themes, some with screenshots)
http://themegarden.org/drupal6/ (live demos of all of the above themes)

Wordpress Themes are here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

...but if you choose wordpress.com, you'll be limited the ~60 themes they make available.

Many themes do allow some minimal customization, such as variable color schemes, or custom logos. (Practically all Drupal themes allow you to upload your own logo. I'm not sure about how Wordpress deals with this.)

- Training: All the blogging tools worth using have books available at your local Barnes & Noble or Borders.

- Technical Support: If you've got some patience and tenacity, most problems can be solved by making use of free online forums, chat rooms, and documentation.

So the trick is always finding the right balance between how much money you're willing to spend, and how much time you want to dedicate to learning and doing the work yourself.

If your company is looking to do blogging right, and you've planned the time & budget for a professional project, please do contact us.

Matt Chapman - Owner, Ninjitsu Web Development

This work by The Matt Chapman Company, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.