I have noticed that a lot of people have blogs, and I love it! I started mine in 2016, and although it hasn’t really gone far, I still enjoy blogging and sharing my resources. My new name change I did recently has really given me a sense of achievement and just makes me want to blog more. The reason for this post is to help people who are interested in getting into blogging but aren’t sure which blogging sites are right for them. Below I have listed three of the best blogging sites (in my opinion) and given my reasons of why I think they’re good, some cons and how easy they are to get going.

  1. WordPress – I host my blog on WordPress and I love it. I have not had any sense of regret of hosting it on WordPress over the last four years of me doing so. I found WordPress very difficult to use at the beginning as well as very limited. Eventually, I did branch out and spent a while actually focusing on how it worked. This blog has been through quite a few themes and I have always struggled on making it look how I want it to look. I think at the moment I definitely like it, but there are things I’d change about it e.g. seeing the full post when you scroll down and the lack of a proper search function. I host my site on a personal plan and it costs £34 a year. There’s a bunch of stuff you get with it which I haven’t really bothered with as having the domain was important to me, but I ended up going for the personal plan to remove all of the annoying ads as I find them irritating when I go onto sites. I think WordPress takes a long time to get used to and understand how it works. As I said, I started this blog in 2016 and I am still learning. I know how to post and customise the theme, that’s about it. I always get quick enough responses from the WordPress team through Twitter if I need a hand but I just try and figure it out myself as much as possible.
  2. Weebly – Weebly offers a blogging service alongside the main website. I think this would be good if you’re looking to create an online store, or have a main page outside of your blog. I always recommend Weebly as a good starter website for when you want something slightly more advanced than a good Google Site, so the blogging feature I haven’t really looked at, however, I have used it once or twice when trialling out a BCoT Digital blog, although it did not go ahead. I think Weebly would be best if you’re not looking for a standalone blog. Weebly’s personal plan is a bit more expensive than WordPress but not too much and you do get the free domain for one year which is pretty good! However, there do still tend to be ads. Although, if you’re looking to host a website as well, the professional plan might be a bit better.
  3. Blogger – Blogger is something one of my students used as part of their Games Testing assignment. I know that the official Google blog is hosted on Blogger and there are quite a few education professionals who use Blogger. I personally found Blogger a bit basic when I was trialling it for my blog and I found the themes to be basic as well. If all you’re after is a basic blog, then I’d definitely recommend it. I did find the domains to be cheaper than what WordPress offered – Blogger was £10, while WordPress £15 but this was for different domain names. I couldn’t find a price plan for Blogger, however, I did find the user interface a bit confusing (might just be me though) so I could have just missed it all together. I do think Blogger is great and it looks good as one of those retro blogs and as always, it’s about personal preference and taste.

I hope my opinions on different blogging sites have been somewhat useful. It’s a bit of me rambling but sometimes another opinion, as well as an idea where to start, can be quite useful. If you do start blogging, just have fun with it. I love blogging because it lets me get all the noise out of my head and I like the idea that someone might stumble across one of my posts and learn something new! Thanks for reading. 🙂