With the demise of JournalSpace two weeks ago and news of cutbacks at LiveJournal last week, blogging has been a hot topic lately. There are literally millions of blogs on the internet, ranging from simple online diaries to cute and crazy animal sites to news and commentary sites. People around the world use blogs to discuss anything and everything with friends, family members and anyone else who happens upon their blog.

Have you ever thought about starting a blog? It may seem like a daunting task, but it can be a really fun project. To begin, you just need an interesting topic to discuss or a niche to fill and a few ideas for blog posts. But once you’ve got a clear idea of your blog’s purpose, and you’re ready to start, where should you create your blog? There are a dizzying array of sites out there vying for your blogging business!

If you’re just starting out, you’ll likely want to find a free or low-cost blogging service that hosts your site for you. That’s what I did for my first blog (my personal site, Life in Amsterdam). These services are great because they don’t require much (if any) knowledge of HTML coding or any special software, they offer a number of great features and add-ons, and they can produce surprisingly professional-looking results. Plus, free and low-cost blogging services are a great way to try out the blogging medium without much financial commitment.

If you already have some experience blogging and making websites, or if you’re just ambitious, you may want to consider hosting your site yourself. Hosting your own site means that you either literally host it yourself on a computer you own and maintain everything yourself or pay for a hosting service (like BlueHost or DreamHost) and upload your site to their servers. For the purposes of this article, however, I’m going to discuss using the free and low-cost blogging services.

Before I started blogging, I thought a lot about what I wanted my personal site to look like, and I tried out nine different services in October and November 2008 to see which best fit my needs. My list included two paid options, Squarespace and TypePad, and seven free options: Blog.com, Blogger, FreeWebs, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Vox and WordPress.com. The two paid options offered free trial accounts, so I set up accounts will all nine. (I feel I should mention that while many of these services do offer expanded features for a fee, I did not pay for any extras during my “research period.”) Setting up blogs with all these services and examining their features was a surprising amount of work, but I did learn a great deal by doing it, and you may want to do a similar sort of trial run for yourself.

For my personal site, Life in Amsterdam, I set up some basic criteria. My blog service would need to: allow me to post text, photos and videos; offer me a good selection of themes to choose from; provide me with at least 1 GB of storage space and 1 GB of bandwidth (per month); track the number of visitors and page views my site received; integrate with other sites like Flickr and Delicious; and be easy to work with and customizable. I also didn’t really want ads placed on my site, but I was willing to be flexible, since I knew I was demanding a lot of my free host. Here’s how the seven free services stacked up: (All of the services allowed me to post the content I wanted, so I won’t mention that in each section.)

Blog.com met some, but not all, of my criteria. It offered 1 GB of storage space and 2 GBs of bandwidth per month, and it included site statistics (though not very detailed). Blog.com did not place ads on my site, but it would allow me to place them there to make money, if I liked. However, Blog.com did not integrate with other sites, and while they had a decent number of themes, none of them really grabbed me. On top of that, I didn’t like the dashboard (the control panel for the blog) and user interface.

Blogger is associated with Google, so if you have a Google account, you can use your username and password to create your blog. Blogger met more of my criteria: it had a pretty good choice of themes; Blogger offered unlimited storage and bandwidth; Blogger gave me the option to install Google Analytics (a Google application for tracking site traffic); it could integrate with almost any service I wanted; and it was relatively easy to operate. After a few hours, I had a nice blog to show, and it didn’t force ads onto it.

FreeWebs was a mixed bag for me. I really liked the blog I created, but I had to fight with the site at times to get it the way I wanted. FreeWebs did meet most of my criteria though: it had a great selection of themes, it was customizable, it offered traffic statistics, and it gave me the option to have ads (to earn some money) or to keep them off my site. FreeWebs gave me 25 GBs of bandwidth per month (far more than my minimum), but it only gave me 750 MBs of storage space. That, combined with the difficulties I found in customizing the site, pushed it down a bit on my list of contenders.

LiveJournal didn’t really work for me. It offered a nice selection of themes, and it was pretty easy to work with, but it limited the way I could customize my site. It offered 2 GBs of storage space, but I couldn’t find a clear answer about how much bandwidth per month I would receive. It allowed me to post links to other sites, but it didn’t allow me to really integrate with them through widgets (small gadgets usually in the sidebar or at the bottom of a website that provide content from another site, utilities like weather forecasts, or other bits of information). It also did not provide any site statistics, and it forced banner ads onto my pages.

Tumblr offered only a few themes to choose from, but it also offered the option to create your own theme and customize it. It offered site statistics through Google Analytics, and it didn’t force any ads onto my site. However, I found it a bit difficult to work with, as I couldn’t customize my page without diving into the code, and I couldn’t find any published information regarding the amount of storage space or bandwidth that was allotted to my site. I think Tumblr may be a great free blogging service if you have knowledge of HTML and/or you want extra control over your site, but I felt like it was more work than I wanted to commit to for my first site.

Vox had some of the coolest themes I found on a free service, it was easy to work with, and I also had the ability to embed a variety of widgets on my pages. However, Vox inserted banner and text-based ads onto my site, it didn’t offer site statistics, and it didn’t tell me how much space or bandwidth my site could use.

WordPress.com offered me a good selection of themes, a lot of options to customize my site, widgets to display my content from other sites, basic site statistics, 3 GBs of storage space and unlimited bandwidth. The only downside I found with WordPress.com was their policy of placing ads on sites; however, the ads were small, and I could pay a fee to keep my site ad free.

As I mentioned earlier, I also tried out two services that would charge fees for my blogs after my two-week trial periods expired. These two services were similar in design to the free services, as I created and managed all of my content using their online user interface (as opposed to using software offline or a separate content management system and uploading my content to a server). Here are my findings for them, using the same criteria I listed above, with the fees listed in US dollars:

Squarespace charged $8 per month (or $86.40, if I paid for a year up front) for the basic account service. This basic service met some of my criteria: I received 1 GB of storage space and 75 GBs per month of bandwidth, no ads were placed on my site, and Squarespace offered detailed site statistics. But I didn’t really like the themes Squarespace offered, I couldn’t post widgets to my site (I could only have a links page), and I didn’t find the service all that simple. There were tons of options to customize things, but that made editing my site take longer when compared to the other services, and I found the many editing options a bit overwhelming.

TypePad charged $14.95 per month (or $149.50, if I paid for a year in advance) for their pro service. I used the pro service for my comparison, since it was the lowest priced plan that offered 1 GB of storage space. The pro plan with TypePad offered 10 GBs per month of bandwidth, it was easy to work with, it offered a decent array of themes that I could customize a bit, it offered site statistics, it integrated well with other sites using widgets, and I wasn’t forced to have ads on my site, although I could choose to place them there to make money.

So now that I’ve completely overwhelmed you with all these details, I’ll try to sum things up a bit. I ended up choosing WordPress.com to host my personal site. (You can see my Life in Amsterdam site on WordPress.com here: www.kathykeating.net. Please note: I do have to pay $10 per year to use my own web address.) I just really liked WordPress.com—it was easy to use and gave me plenty of ways to personalize my site.

If I had been willing to invest more time in creating my site, or if I could remember more of what I once learned about HTML, I might have chosen Tumblr. Other sites I saw on Tumblr appeared to load quickly and have a great deal of content on them (alleviating some of my worries about the lack of information on storage space and bandwidth).

And if I hadn’t have found WordPress.com, I probably would have chosen Blogger for my site. Blogger met all my criteria, and I enjoyed working with it too. But I have to confess that one of my main reasons for choosing WordPress.com was that it had a couple themes I liked better than my favorite Blogger theme.

As you may now realize, I think choosing a blogging service is rather subjective. I tried to be thorough, but I know that I was often swayed by attractive visual themes and ease of use. And I think it’s actually ok to be this way. You’re the one who has to use the service regularly, so if you find a few that meet your bottom line, why shouldn’t you choose the one with the best themes or the best user interface—or both, if you’re lucky?

The best thing I learned from all this research is that it’s possible to have a professional-looking blog, that’s easy for you to use and easy for visitors to navigate, that’s absolutely free. I think that’s great news for everyone!

I hope this article has helped you learn more about some of the more popular blogging services available. If you have any comments or recommendations for blogging services you really like, please post a comment below to let everyone know. And if you do decide to start a blog, best of luck to you!

Copyright © 2009, Kathy Keating and TechKathy.com. All rights reserved.