Thinking About Starting A Blog?
If you have little or no presence on the Internet with your art, one of the fastest ways to get started is with a blog. With it you can post images of your art regularly and start building a following.
Two blogging platforms that I use are Blogger and Wordpress. Both are free and use a “template” format.
Blogger.com has been around since 1999 and became part of the Google family in 2003. If you choose this format you can have a basic blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Your URL or domain name will be “_______.blogspot.com” and you fill in the front end blank.
Wordpress.com set up a free hosting service in 2005 for users of the Wordpress software. With this service you will have a domain of “_______.wordpress.com” where again; you choose the front end name.
Which is easier?
Both are fairly easy formats, but Blogger is viewed by most to be the simplest. Part of that is probably due to all of the additions features available with Wordpress so there are more menu items to go through.
Template Formats
Both have “themes” you can choose from. Blogger has around 30 templates and Wordpress.com has 60 plus. Those numbers don’t really mean a lot, since you can do some customization to the templates. Blogger allows color changes. Wordpress lets you change the headers, but not much else.
Both have sidebar add-ons. In Blogger they are called Gadgets and in Wordpress they are Widgets. You can arrange them in any order that pleases you. These allow you to customize your blog by adding feeds, html, labels, slideshows, videos, followers, Twitter, Facebook and many other items.
Examples
This blog you are reading at this very moment was built with the Wordpress software. But instead of using the Wordpress.com free hosting, I downloaded the software from Wordpress.org. I then uploaded it to my own hosting service account so that I could have total freedom to customize the blog template. Plus, I didn’t want to be limited to the storage capabilities of the free hosting services.
Blogger also has some great features that I like, so I use it for my artist blog at http://deeoverly.blogspot.com. Since it is in a location separate from my artist website, I created links to connect the two for easy access to both.
