It uses an abundance of white space so that its text has a perfect canvas. Black text on a white background. A simple, easy-to-read font. Medium offers no glitz, glam, or sparkles. And, unlike WordPress. Launched in , WordPress.
In any given month, over million people will view more than 21 billion pages on WordPress. Back in September , more than 70 million posts were published and over 52 million blog comments were written. Go to WordPress. See the address bar at the top of your browser? In the case of this site, the custom domain name is smartblogger.
If the domain is the parent, the subdomain is the child. Readers would type kevinsawesomeblog. However, WordPress. For a complete list of the built-in functionality that WordPress. Possibly WordPress. You can find virtually anything you need to know about using their free platform in WordPress. Visit the WordPress. Post the question yourself. Whereas Medium prevents you from customizing the look of your blog, WordPress. And, last but not least, WordPress.
But WordPress. That gives it an edge over the other options. If you want to blog and do something else with your site , WordPress. If you want a professional blog for your business, you should skip WordPress. Free is wonderful, but using WordPress. Medium shines a spotlight on the best its members have to offer.
If you write something great, it has a chance to be featured and seen by millions. Primarily used for professional networking, LinkedIn also offers a publishing platform. This allows any of its million users as of September to write posts that could potentially be read by any of the million members who are active in a given month.
Go to LinkedIn. When you write an article, LinkedIn will notify your existing connections. And, like with Medium, great content on LinkedIn has a chance to get noticed by those outside your list of connections. As of June , Instagram has 1 billion users worldwide. The previous September, they had million users — a growth of million in only nine months. Even if you subtract everyone who follows a Kardashian or has posted a photo of themselves impersonating a duck, Instagram offers an audience of well over 75 people.
On a personal computer, go to Instagram. Enter your phone number or email address, your name, your desired username, and a strong password. You get a great image. In the above screenshot, Sarah Von Bargen cleverly plugs a course she offers in the midst of a tiny, bite-sized post accompanied by a photo of assorted beverages. And in the below screenshot, my friend Jaime Buckley in true Jaime Buckley style , uses Instagram to publish an eye-catching graphic alongside inspirational words on parenting.
Also, if your target audience tends to shy away from mobile devices for any reason, Instagram might not be the best platform to test your ideas. Next on our list of the best blog sites is another open-source content management system Joomla that you can use to build all kinds of websites. We have detailed information about it in WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal and in the post on how to create a website with Joomla.
To get started with Joomla, follow this guide here. Medium is a publishing platform founded in by one of the people behind Twitter. By now, it has become a popular community for writers, bloggers, and journalists. In addition to the ability to write blog posts, it also comes with limited social networking functions. The audience is built into the platform. The platform is free to use. If you have your domain, you can hook it up to individual stories.
Ghost is a publishing platform focused only on blogging. The idea was to make a more streamlined and modern version of WordPress.
As a consequence, the platform is built on JavaScript. The price for the hosted version depends on the number of websites and the amount of traffic. This also includes SSL encryption. Ghost has prioritized support, uptime guarantee, and other premium features. All plans come with a custom domain. Squarespace is a drag-and-drop website builder which is aimed at small business owners. Squarespace is subscription-based. It comes with only two plans: Personal and Business.
You get a discount and a free custom domain if you pay annually. Both plans come with unlimited pages, bandwidth, and storage. You can use your domain name, which comes with extra costs.
There is a day free trial to test the waters. To get started with Squarespace, follow this guide here. Blogger is a free blog hosting service that has been around for a long time. It was founded in and acquired by Google in As a consequence, you can sign up easily with your existing Google account. Blogger is completely free. The only cost you might incur is if you want to use a custom domain.
This is all just as easy from a mobile device as from a desktop—no app required. The blogging process is as intuitive and easy-to-use as folks described—but there were also some other additions that surprised me. There are many SEO features you can use, from alt tags for your images and internal links to SEO titles and descriptions that are different from your post title and nofollow tags for external links.
Just make sure that you update your SEO settings for every post—this is what gets presented in search results and is critical for ranking organically. We also like the ability to use live chat to interact with your readers in the Wix app. Most Wix blogs tended to look great across mobile, tablet, and desktop—something our users said helped them draw in readers.
There are a few downsides to Wix — but even from our panel of users, it seemed their major complaints boiled down to a couple points. Occasionally Wix will feature stand-out blogs that use their platform, and that can lead to new opportunities as was the case with one of our users.
Wix offers the best blogging platform for the vast majority of readers coming to this article i. Our own hands-on research verified that. We could create a great looking blog with zero experience with Wix in literal minutes. Imagine what you could do with more time. And if you really want to take the guesswork out of designing your website, you can even let Wix take care of it for you by answering a few questions and letting their advanced AI take care of the rest.
Bottom line: We highly recommend Wix to beginner bloggers who want to easily build a great looking blog. And with tools like its ecommerce functionality and Wix email marketing, you can grow and shape your website to optimize for things like profit and audience growth. Total Score: 4. The reason? WordPress is open source. Developers can go in and create widgets, plugins, and other tools to customize WordPress blogs—so you can create any kind of blog you want.
Their experience is echoed by many of our other users. That said, there is a bit of a learning curve. Another echoed that sentiment. One user was also able to promote items for third parties in order to generate even more revenue. They were also able to leverage plugins to help them build their audience—and generate revenue growth.
At first blush, the blog dashboard for WordPress seems more complex than most. The platform introduced their Gutenberg editor recently, which can make the editing process much simpler. They lay out everything you might need to publish a blog in a fairly intuitive, easy-to-grasp way. The layout is easy to manage, and finding font settings and image inserts is a snap. No matter what you want to build or how big you get, the platform will grow with you so long as you choose the right plugins.
One plugin we do recommend you get is the Yoast SEO plugin. This is an incredibly popular WordPress plugin that helps you set up your posts to be as SEO-friendly as possible with a few guided steps. And if you really want, you can start changing the code yourself. Since WordPress is open-source, that means you can do whatever you want with it.
It gave me an easy interface to post my blogs, as well as everything I needed or wanted in my blog: a subscription box, an author area; just the look I wanted and the flexibility to change things as needed. The quick answer: Go with Bluehost. They even recommend using Bluehost as a hosting option.
Our own panel of users used this exact combination of WordPress with Bluehost to create their own websites. And I really prefer the portal at Bluehost compared to the old place plus the service is better for me. They also have a stellar customer support team available by chat, email, or phone if any issues come up. They work together seamlessly, the pricing structure is incredibly affordable, and you also get things like domain registration for free.
Another flaw that one of our surveyed users mentioned is that WordPress lacks comprehensive customer support. When I checked, I found that WordPress support amounted to a support forum. After posting a test question on there, it took about two hours before I got a reply back. Along with scoring very highly across all criteria, WordPress with Bluehost is a great place to start if you really want to build a blog that will grow with you no matter how big you get.
WordPress and Bluehost can do that. Bottom line: Building a WordPress website takes more time than a Wix website. However, the tradeoff is your website is much more customizable and powerful. And Bluehost makes it easy to host your WordPress site. The first thing I notice whenever I go onto a Squarespace blog is how gorgeous it typically looks. Photography and graphic designs seem to leap off the screen.
The blog owners themselves seem to always be artistically-minded like illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, home decor experts, and more. Our panel was no exception. They were made up of a website design expert who teaches readers how to make stunning sites, a gardening influencer who frequently showcases mouth watering photos of his homegrown vegetables, and an interior designer who likes to flex their room designs off in gallery posts.
The trio rated Squarespace very highly across the board. Each criteria received no less than a 4 on average, and many of the users had glowing words to say about its ease of use and designs.
Their site frequently showcases captivating photographs of eclectically designed rooms. Their claims are backed up by my own research of hundreds of Squarespace blogs. Editing your blog—from the contacts page, to the about page, to the home page, to your portfolio, to the actual blog itself—is very easy with Squarespace.
Like Wix they have a drag-and-drop tool. That user is also known as Paige Brunson. She discovered the wonders of Squarespace years back and loved it so much she created a thriving career helping other people design on it too.
Squarespace also gives you tools to add an ecommerce portion to your blog along with a newsletter integration. That can really help you scale and transform your blog for profitability and audience growth. Where our panel of users found Squarespace lacking can be boiled down to one word: Customization. For more complex websites this might be a problem. While Paige is an evangelist for Squarespace, she believes that it could be better when it comes to its mobile customization.
Sometimes you have to hunt and click here and there. However, we knocked it below WordPress ultimately because of its limited customization and—as a result of limited customization—scalability. Users might be turned off by the platform due to its lack of features. On top of all that, you need to pay a higher price for access to custom CSS.
Bottom line: Squarespace offers great looking templates, easy drag-and-drop designs, and an opportunity to show off your art, photographs, and more.
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