Review Of The Top Three Blogging Platforms – WordPress, TypePad and Blogger

Unlike the extensive variety of website building platforms from which you can choose, there are three platforms dominating the blogging universe: WordPress, TypePad and Blogger. Here’s a rundown of the three and what each has to offer.

WordPress

Is the most popular and widely used blogging platform available today. It is what is referred to as an “open source,” which means it is not owned by any company and is available license-free. Blog sites can either be hosted free at WordPress.com or the software can be uploaded to many commercially available web servers.

The difference is when hosted on a commercial server there becomes an almost endless variety of “widgets,” plug-ins that allow for specific enhancements and usages. A worldwide WordPress developer community exists where literally thousands of site themes and hundreds of enhancement widgets and plug-ins are available for purchase and many are free.

There are several advantages using WordPress including:

• It can be free when hosted at WordPress.com. Plus, you can re-route your domain name to the one supplied by WordPress.
• You can design and use the WordPress “static page” feature producing flexible website pages.
• A variety of themes can be used to produce an almost limitless amount of website appearances.
• WordPress supplies a very strong ant-spam feature called “Akismet.”
• Since it is an open source software, there exists and immense amount of free help provided by developer-savvy amateurs and professionals willing to share tutorials, documentations, widgets and site themes.
• Statistics are available that can be used for many purposes including marketing

There are disadvantages as well including:

• WordPress editing is not intuitively user-friendly. There exists a need to have, or follow directions for, editing knowledge about PHP, the mark-up language upon which the platform is written.
• The themes available free at WordPress.com are usually not flexible enough providing to meet all your requirements unless you opt for paid upgrades.
• Also, the embedding of any type of code may be limited using the free WordPress.com hosting as well as when self-hosted unless you use additional plug-ins that may be available for a fee.

TypePad

Is the hosting software offered by Six Apart that runs its blogging product, Movable Type, which is used by many high-profile e-commerce sites. There is a 14-day free trial version that leads to a monthly fee charge of approximately $15. Once an account is established, multiple blogs can be created. Software is also available to be loaded on commercial servers as well.

The advantages using TypePad include:

• TypePad possesses an interface more user-friendly than WordPress.
• Designing a site is simple employing a drag and drop system and a sidebar can be implemented.
• A TypePad account can accommodate many blogs through using addresses such as blog1.typepad.com, blog2.typepad.com. etc.

The disadvantages include:

• Although it is also open-source software, there is a limited number of TypePad “community members” restricting availability of help sources to any design or operation problems that come up.
• Domain names are always in the “xxx.typepad.com/blog” configuration so any attempt at forwarding will reveal your blog is hosted here.
• Spam is not handled as well as it is on WordPress.

Blogger

Unlike WordPress or TypePad, Blogger is not open-source software, therefore, there are no clever and talented web geeks working toward making it better, bigger and more user-friendly. It is a product produce by Google hosted at Blogger.com.

The advantages using this software include:

• Great and easy integration with many other Google products like Picasa (photo sharing).
• Code is easily placed in templates for making quick fixes, although there may be some maintenance challenges.

The disadvantages include:

• Limited looks or themes that restrict designing like a traditional website
• There are no self-install versions of the software so using it is limited to “blogspot.com.”
• The only availability for a static page is the offer of an “About” page.
• There is no development community for finding themes and plug-ins.

Information can be exported and imported between WordPress to TypePad such as posts, comments and pages. However, there are some items like photos that might not be transferable.