[Question] Blog Advice

[Ravenpoe]

I'm working on a project that is going to require me to make a website with regular blog posts. I've never actually kept a blog, though, so I'm looking for advice. I have very little html experience, so I'd like advice on the easiest, cheapest way to do this.

What have you guys had success with?

 

[strawman]

If you can meet your requirements and use a free blogging platform like blogger, wordpress, or even facebook or google+, then go that route.

If you can't use any of those existing free solutions, you can get a website with CPanel and one click installations for wordpress and several other popular blogging platforms for $5 or less per month. I prefer http://www.a2hosting.com/web-hosting these days, but web hosts are a dime a dozen.

You won't have to know HTML unless you want to customize a blog theme more than just changing the images and colors. If you use Wordpress you'll have access to hundreds of decent themes, though, so you probably won't have to touch anything that isn't easily altered in the administration panel.

 

[fade]

Wordpress. You can install it yourself or use their free hosting. Any of the others stieny mentioned work, too. I would put Wordpress on top because it's portable. You can move to a new host or migrate out to your own host from the free version if you outgrow it. Plus, there is a ton of support out there for WP.

 

[Bowielee]

Oh, get a bl... oh, wait....

 

[doomdragon6]

Wordpress is probably "best", but it is such a HUUUUUGE pain in the ass to use. I don't find it very user-friendly at all. Blogger, on the other hand, it nice, simple, and straightforward. If you want no headaches, go Blogger. If you want customization (which without html/css knowledge it'll be a little difficult) but huge headaches, go Wordpress.

 

[GasBandit]

I found very little difficulty using wordpress when I was making a website for work - setting it up, however, took some effort and some SQL ju-jitsu.

 

[CrimsonSoul]

My wife's book review blog (see sig) is on Wordpress and I've never had any problems out of it and it's very simple to use[DOUBLEPOST=1364289295][/DOUBLEPOST]

I found very little difficulty using wordpress when I was making a website for work - setting it up, however, took some effort and some SQL ju-jitsu.

If you have a host that uses cpanel just use softalicious and wordpress is a one click install, it'll install the db for you and everything and you'll be up and running in less than a minute

 

[fade]

I've done quite a few WP installs, and I've never had any issue. Even theming is pretty easy compared to most CMSs out there. The trade-off is flexibility, but then it's a blog, so it will probably look like a blog. You really can't beat the user frontend as far as CMSs go. It's free but nicely decked out, and there are tons of plugins. If you want to do it, someone has probably written a plugin that does it. And you can install and update the core, the themes, and the plugins all from the user interface, which is not something some of the other CMSs do.

 

[GasBandit]

What I meant was, something went wrong with my wordpress install and I had to manually fix my sql database to get it to function. But that was about 8 years ago, so maybe that doesn't happen any more.