I’ve tried them all, or just about. My first blog was hosted on Angelfire and was a text file that was eerily similar to a certain 14-year-old doctor. I was on LiveJournal, I had a Blogger/Blogspot account, I have a couple of 3-post of blogs still rotting on WordPress.com’s servers. I have settled on my own personal preference for WordPress self hosted blogs/sites.
In honor of full-disclosure, I haven’t tried out TypePad thoroughly, but I’m not opposed to it. Brian’s post about TypePad has convinced me to give it a run for the money, but like he said, “WordPress.org is the most robust and full-featured platform out there.”
It’s that robustness and feature-fullness that has sold me.
For the Ministry Website
Most of you are not looking to be anything close to a professional blogger, you’re wanting to set up a page that draws in your audience and is able to get to them the information that you want. Your audience will largely be the same people from day-to-day and even year-to-year – whether it’s your supporters or your students, most of them aren’t going to find the site through Google; they’re finding your site through you telling them about it. Your main goal is to get them to keep coming back.
You’ll pick your design once perhaps – WordPress makes that really easy. You go to the “themes” tab and pick one. Voila! Your site looks like the example!
For the Ministry Blogger
You’re looking for extra functionality. How do I link my Twitter profile to my site? How do I post pictures in a gallery so my supporters can see what I’m doing? How do I get my students to engage in a conversation about what I’m posting?
This is the great part about WordPress’ plugins. All three of those things are included in the features of the thousands of plugins available to you in WordPress. Go to the Add New Plugins page and search your term, whether it’s “twitter”, “gallery” or “comments”. Within a page or two you’ll know which ones you’re looking for and can get it running in 5 minutes. And there are tons of places to learn how to do whatever you want, from WordPress.tv to the official Codex to hundreds of blogs and forums dedicated to WordPress and it’s add-ons.
Characteristics of a WordPress (SH) candidate:
- You like customization.
- You like free software.
- You’re willing to pay for hosting.
- You’re willing to learn a little to do your site well.
WordPress self-hosted is not for everyone, but to repeat myself and Brian: it is the most robust and full-featured platform out there.
Next time I’ll post a video about how easy it is to set one up.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
we should do some posts on hosting.
i know for me that was THE biggest barrier to entry in going SH WordPress.
i knew enough html and social media principles to manage the blog; i had no clue how to manage & run the platform.
here are two key things i learned about hosting that others shared with me:
*http://cyberduck.ch/ this is a free program that makes it super easy to manage your wordpress blog. i didn’t want to pay for anything robust, and this finally helped me get going on managing the back-end of wordpress.
Brian, Brian , Brian…Just ask us for help and u got it, mang…WP self-hosted is golden W goodness bro.
hey jim i think the problem is that amateurs and people new to social media are so afraid of looking dumb that they don’t ask anyone.
wp self hosted is by far the most robust platform; however SO MANY field staff i know that want to use social media simply do not have the time to do the minimal amount of work required to maintain a SH site.
if more people could understand that the blog of their dreams is AT LEAST two to three blogs away i think all would eventually get to SH WordPress.
really that’s one of the main goals of this blog is to encourage people to make it past the painful learning stage.
thanks for the commenting!
I agree Brian! I really want to learn more about Self Hosted WordPress Blog, but really don’t know much about hosting… a post about this would be really helpful for me and Im sure a lot of other people.
Drew, Brian and I are going to work on that post very soon. We talked yesterday about the direction and next steps that we wanted to take and that exact post topic is one of our “next steps”.