We are asked on a regular basis here at envoca to build blogs for our clients. In my opinion, there is really no clear choice for which is the best blogging platform. While the majority of our clients get setup on WordPress as a great, well-rounded choice for blogging, it is important for us to note that there are a number of great alternatives out there as well. All of the following blogging platforms are free for anyone to use for both personal and commercial purposes.
Blogger
The blogging platform built by the founders of twitter before they worked at Google is a good choice for the code-shy beginner. This platform’s advantages are ease of use, a substantial support community, and the fact that it takes very little time to setup and use. There are many pre-built templates available and because it is owned by Google you get the assurance that your site will seldom do down for reason beyond your control.
Tumblr
Tumblr is my recommendation for the most simplistic, feature-stripped, and easy to use blogging tool. While technically it is a “micro-blogging” platform, many of its users post the same type and quantity of content as users of any other blogging platform. Aside from that, the platform is very robust and maintains a great reputation among developers despite it’s intended audience of non-technical users.
Posterous
Posterous is pretty good overall and realistically takes only about 15 minutes to learn how to use. You don’t even need to sign up in order to use it. To me, Posterous is more for the user who wants to spend time posting content and not necessarily maintaining a blog.
Movable Type
This platform, from parent company Six Apart, is usually targeted at a slightly more technical crowd. While their developer community is very helpful and tight-knit, it lacks the sheer size of other more popular platforms such as WordPress or Blogger. For most of my users, I would not recommend this platform.
WordPress
It’s tough to find bad things to say about this platform. WordPress is by far the most popular platform on this list and for good reason. Currently at Envoca, this is definitely the most popular platform among our clients. While being fairly easy to install and use, it supports a legion of plugins from the user community that save hours if not months of work for the average blog owner. This is the best platform for users looking to monetize their blog with Google AdSense revenue due to the number of plugins available that can help with configuring display ads.
“Advertising Manager” (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advertising-manager/) which allows you to support multiple ad networks simultaneously.
“AdSense Revenue Sharing” (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adsense-revenue-sharing/) which allows you to track and split revenue among authors.
“Adsense Under Image” (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adsense-under-image/) which allows you to place ads under a posts first image, but only on post pages.
“Adsense Attachment Page” (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adsense-attachment-plugin/) Allows you to automatically display ads on attachment pages, useful for image galleries etc…
