February :: 2010 :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

For business blogs, the Blogger and WordPress.com sites leave much to be desired

Blogger Logo People just getting into blogging for business will often start with a Blogger site or sometimes with a WordPress.com site.

In this post I go over some reasons why I recommend against using Blogger or WordPress.com, as far as business blogging is concerned.

I know there are successful blogs on the Google-owned Blogger platform. And speaking historically, if it hadn’t been for the original Blogger making the process of starting blogging so fall-over easy, there might not be so many happy bloggers around today.

wplogo128 And as with Blogger, the WordPress hosted WordPress.com sites are so easy and quick to set up that it is tempting for the time-strapped business owner who may have decided against Blogger, to go with WordPress.com. Many do.

However, my advice to people who want to blog for business or as part of their business is move to a situation where you have more control. Typically this will mean getting a self-hosted site, such as with WordPress.org. The analogy from our offline world is that you have more control if you own your own house than if you are renting (and thus dependent on the continuing good will of the owner).

With Blogger and with WordPress.com you simply cannot have the control over your own online assets that you have with a self-hosted site.

Gautam Hans provides a good list of reasons for anyone blogging professionally to move from Blogger. To his list I would add, as at least one of the commenters on that post does, the matter of control, as explained above. And for anyone contemplating setting up a WordPress.com site, I recommend a thoughtful reading of the terms of service.

I have tried so many blogging platforms I have truly lost count. WordPress.org, self-hosted, works. There are a number of hosting services which want to attract you to set up your WordPress site with them. We use HostGator and are very happy with them, on price and on quality of service (24/7 chat is standard service). To paraphrase an old advertising slogan, we liked HostGator so much we became affiliates.

Some hosting services, such as PressHarbor, will give you more personalised help with your WordPress.org setup and give you specialised support.

And if you don’t like your hosting service, you can move the blog without detriment (assuming you are on a monthly payment).

There are other, perfectly good solutions besides WordPress.org. I’ll save those for subsequent posts. And of course, as always, I welcome comments and suggestions.

I made a short video on Animoto to see how long it would take

My experiment last week with Xtranormal

Last week I made a short video using the online Xtranormal tool. While it was fun up to a point, I decided it was a tad too beta for me to use right now for any business-related purpose.

Comparing with Animoto

Inevitably, I was comparing it with Animoto, which I first heard about late in 2007 and then posted about here, just over two years ago, with a very basic test video.

The comments on the post last week about the Xtranormal service prompted me to revisit Animoto last night and do yet another quick video, just by grabbing some images from my computer and selecting some music from the clips on offer from the Animoto site.

No Oscar for this production, but what might be of interest to others was how long it took, namely about 30 minutes. But about 20 minutes of that was searching for music – I think there was a *lot* of music there for Valentine’s Day. In the event, I picked something for the sound and ignored the title “A Night in the Park” which was not really spot on for a video featuring daytime beach scenes.

Both my previous experiment in 2008 and this one were done using the 30 second free version. After all this time I am seriously thinking of throwing caution to the winds and taking out a full access for one year subscription for the princely sum of $30.

A few of the things I like about Animoto:

* you can use their music or yours
* uploading images is easy (next I’ll have to try their video upload)
* sharing to YouTube was just a click (also in Xtranormal except it didn’t work there)

I’m thinking of some smart ways I can use Animoto, e.g. to kick off a couple of presentations I’m doing over the next couple of weeks. For that I’ll probably need to make that move sooner rather than later, from cheap (as in, free) to paid.

Why not create your own video slideshow at animoto.com?