Site hosting

This may give you an idea: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-hosting/

Aside from hosting, which platform should a beginning blogger stick with. Is WordPress better than Blogger? I've read the author's suggestions at http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/wordpress-vs-blogger-which-one-is-better-pros-and-cons/, but it is still unclear which option to choose in terms of the cost and design. While there is huge number of impressive WP themes available at http://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes.php and other theme selling websites, which I'd like to implement in a new website's design, Blogger only provides a limited set of templates to use, but is completely free.

WordPress.com is completely free too. Maybe you were thinking about WordPress.org, where you get a self-hosted site then download WP software onto it. Which would be the same cost if you downloaded Blogger sw to it. Does Blogger even have that option?

If you don't know a lot about blogging from doing research, I'd say Wordpress.com is probably the best place to start. It's used by a ton of people, it's free, and if your blog takes off and you enjoy it you can always upgrade to Wordpress.org (not 100% free) with very little hassle.

I'm personally planning to use Ghost when I get started, but Wordpress is a close second for me.

If you already have a hosting package, Wordpress.org actually works out best financially -- biggest range of free themes and no need to pay extra to use a custom URL or access backend files. In Wordpress.com you need to pay to use your own URL, and pay for premium support if you want to do any backend stuff in a hurry eg get a backup copy of your site files. (It's a two second job on Wordpress.org, took a friend a week to get hers from dot com.)

It's generally preferred to Blogger because of customisation reasons: Blogger users are stuck to a limited layout and theme, without much flexibility for building a site around the blog with contact pages, abouts, book info etc. Whereas Wordpress.com sites have a large amount of customisation options which are really great for author sites.

It's worth sitting back and thinking about what you want from a site: do you want a simple blog, great google results, no need to pay for hosting? Blogger's the best, being owned by Google, and Tumblr's also a more customisable contender if you're familiar with that system and do a lot of work focused around images (long text on its own doesn't work so well on Tumblr).

Want something a bit more customisable, with more themes and control than Blogger? Want book blurbs, art, any fancy 'proper website' pages? Wordpress.com, or Tumblr with some clever theming to make it more like a traditional blog.

Want to include a shop, heavy theming, or other complex website features (eg a forum, social network) and do you feel confident enough to backup your site and fix your own mistakes? Wordpress.org.

(Side note: I really, really don't recommend Tumblr to anyone unfamiliar with it -- the UI's a disaster. But it *is* customisable and a lot of authors like it, so it felt wrong to leave it out.)

swaver said:

Aside from hosting, which platform should a beginning blogger stick with. Is WordPress better than Blogger? I've read the author's suggestions at http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/wordpress-vs-blogger-which-one-is-better-pros-and-cons/, but it is still unclear which option to choose in terms of the cost and design. While there is huge number of impressive WP themes available at http://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes.php and other theme selling websites, which I'd like to implement in a new website's design, Blogger only provides a limited set of templates to use, but is completely free.

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I would be very cautious about downloading / using templates that are not hosted by Wordpress; large numbers of other templates have malware, adware, tracking code, etc., often stored as base64 so unless you're fairly sophisticated in looking at the PHP you may not even realize what you're using.

Blogger has fewer templates, but you can customize them or create your own if you're comfortable with HTML and CSS.

AW Admin said:

Blogger has fewer templates, but you can customize them or create your own if you're comfortable with HTML and CSS.

Click to expand...

The idea of "coding" scares some people. They figure it's too hard to get into it. But you only need a few basic concepts to be effective in small ways.

Plus nowadays there are lots of examples which you can copy and tailor to your needs. That's what I do, and I'm a professional programmer who created several web sites from scratch when the internet began to be useful to my boss, NASA at the time. Re-use other people's work (as long as it's free or available at a small cost).

One of the best ways to dip your toes into HTML and CSS is the website W3Schools. They give lots of simple examples, and lets you edit them to see what happens. For instance, in one example where you specify double line spacing of text you can change the 2 to a 3 or 10 or whatever, click the SEE RESULT button, and see the results of the change.

http://www.w3schools.com/

You can also tailor WordPress.com with CSS. One way is a bit labor intensive and requires you to buy a yearly subscription to a CSS Customization option.

But you can also insert CSS into your web posts for free, and easily. I do that by copying one of my previous posts which has a line of CSS at the top. Then I insert my new text over the previous text, hit Save, and I've re-used my own code without doing anything to it.

Here is the code, which may look scary at first glance but simple when you look closer. You can use it however you will. It's mine and public domain.

<div style="border: 2px solid gold; line-height: 120%; font-size: 14pt; font-family: Times New Roman, Times, serif; color: #000000; text-align: left; padding: 10px;">

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This draws a gold border around all the following text. I made the line height a little larger than the default for WP posts (120% greater). Ditto the font: 14 point instead of the 12pt default. Changed the font from the default to Times New Roman. Insured the text is black (#000000). Aligned the text to the left. Put padding between the border and the text (the 10px part).

Going where you are with the idea of going to a host and domain name place like godaddy.com, but not endorsing Godaddy, there are others. Owning your own name as a domain name is one way to protect yourself from those not interested in your well-being. All of the web hosts have a software package that will build your website and Wordpress pages. They have good handholding.

Hopefully you managed your site transfer without a hitch. I switched hosting companies and switching the domain name went from simple to a nightmare to the pint where I actually had to get a new domain name. (had some RL factors which didn't help)