You may have been reading blogs for years, may have stumbled across one and liked the look of it, or may never have read a blog in your life.  But now you want to start your own but have no idea where to start.  Read on to find out more….

The first thing you will need to think about is which blogging platform to use.  There are a few different ones out there and below we shall detail the main ones.

Blogger

You can’t think of blogging without thinking of blogging without thinking of blogger- an extremely popular, free web based blogging service owned by the small and retiring Google!  One fab thing about blogger is that you can sign up and get your blog out on to the world wide web in literally a few minutes.  It is easy to pick up , has lots of different saved templates, and is straight forward to get up and running.  People often think that it is not as customisable as other types of platform- but in actual fact blogger is easy to customise if you know how.  And that is what i heart snapping is here for!  Over the coming months we will show you how to fully customise your blogger blog.  Blogger is a great platform to get started on, as it doesn’t involve a lot of time in order to make a great return.  Most blogger blogs come with a .blogspot.com or .blogspot.co.uk domain name, however you can purchase your own domain in order to cut that out.  There are some really fabulous blogs out there on blogger which are completely customisable such as Dear Beautiful Boy, Mummy Loves and Love From Mummy.  These just go and show you how unique you can make blogger blogs.

WordPress

WordPress is the platform to use if you want to try something a little different, although for the most parts blogger will do all the things you need.  There are two wordpress avenue’s you can go down- wordpress.com or wordpress.org.  Wordpress.com is a free software that will give you access to a url such as iheartsnapping.wordpress.com.  Wordpress.com has a selection of free themes, but you cannot edit html, php or content of a theme.  You can purchase paid upgrades but if you are willing to invest in these you may as well go for wordpress.org.  Wordpress.org is a powerful tool that offers you complete control and flexibility on your blog.  You can install and customise themes, as well as add plugin’s and modify CSS and PHP.  Some of the most powerful and popular bloggers use wordpress.org but you will need to have wordpress hosted on a web server to continue.  There are lots out there, we use bluehost, but it is worth researching into different prices.  If you go down the self hosted route you will be able to monetize your blog through advertisements etc.  It has a massive following and therefore there are always new themes, plugin’s and gadgets being created.  It will take more time and effort to set up than blogger, but if you are interested in playing around with your blog- then maybe WordPress is the answer.  Some examples that we love of WordPress blogs are Innocent Charms Chats and Mummy and The Beastie.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a mixture of a blog and a social media feed- in fact it is known as a micro-blogging site.   With Tumblr you can make some really creative, visual blogs that normally contain images or video and lots of short, frequent posts that are not as formal as a blog post but that are longer than a twitter page.  Tumblr is pretty easy to set up and is a good alternative for people who would like to blog but maybe don’t have as much time.  An example of a fab tumblr page that I have seen recently is for Beyonce’s new website- who would have thought that it was powered by tumblr?  Go and have a look at the Tumblr page if you want to know more about it.

There are other blogger platforms like Posterous and Joomla (which my personal blog is run via) but these are the three you will most likely come across.

As far as choosing which one is best, it really is down to personal choice and what you want from a blog.  My husband and I do some blog design and I must admit to liking blogger- I find it really fun to use, and you can create some great customisable templates.  I think it is user friendly and for personal blogs it looks great.  However there is no denying the power of wordpress and what it can do for your blog- if you are serious about blogging and want to learn more then it definitely is the way forward.

Whatever you decide, it is important to remember that blogging is fun.  So grab a drink, sit back and enjoy.  Over the next coming months, we will be telling you everything you ever needed to know about blogging and blog design.