More than a decade ago, nobody has ever heard about web log or blog. All information in the internet was from websites run by companies and a small portion of individual websites. Producing a website was not a simple thing that everybody can do easily therefore limiting the publication only to developers or webmasters. People without these internet or computer skills will not be able to express their ideas online unless they hire a webmaster. As time move on, a lot of website publishing software emerges in the market allowing almost everybody to be able to publish their own website. Other problems arise as website publishing is not a one-man job. A team of people is required to make an attractive and successful website that have good articles, multimedia and graphic contents, and a good layout. Website publishing software and multimedia software are also quite expensive to be purchased by everybody. Domain registration and site hosting will also add to the cost of publishing a website. There is also an issue of portability where you can only edit the pages on computers with the editing software.
Blogging
Since blogging popularity start to arise in 1999, everybody can publish what they want in the internet at any place that has internet connectivity. There are also good interaction between the authors and readers by using comments and ratings. Blogging platforms provide users with individual accounts with users-selected subdomains for free. These accounts include storage space and editing application to allow users to write their own post. At the early years of blogging popularity, contents are just limited to articles and some images. Further upgrades to the blogging platforms allow users to customize their pages with their own themes, adding widgets or site add-on, and spread their blogs individually in the search engines. Users can also link their own domain name to these hosted blog. The customizing ability allows a blog to perform just like an individual website and promote products like a corporate website. Using the platform-hosted blogs also give search engine and traffic advantages to the individual blogs since there are so many bloggers are using the same platform and they all can link to each other indirectly thought the platform’s portal. This is because most of platform’s homepage or portal will display the latest post of a blogger and help to promote other articles related to a blogger’s post. This linked system will then help in popularity in the search engines.
Some blogging platforms offer users to host their blogs in their own servers by using the self-hosted blogging softwares. These softwares can easily be installed in the hosting server with their own domain names. These servers provide users with more storage space that what is provided by the platform-hosted services. The amount of space is only limited to the users budget. These hosting servers will also allow users to have their own subdomains where users can have a regular website as the main homepage, a blog in a subdomain, and another different blog in another subdomain. Self-hosted blog have unlimited customization ability because it is just depends on the skills of the author. Blogging has become a professional career when more people are making money just by blogging. For the professionals, self-hosted blogs are more preferred as they are more customizable and have better reputation to the advertising networks than the free platform-hosted blogs.
More open source softwares are now available for free in the internet. These softwares were based on the platform-hosted blogs and allow users to have an internet contents without any good webmaster knowledge. These softwares are now not just for publishing blogs but also a website. By installing these softwares in the server, one can edit a website or blog anywhere in the world as long as there is internet connection. Various plug-ins and contents upgrade to these softwares are available including page layout and theme that is plug-and-play with the software eliminate the need of web developers to create their own layout or to work hard to promote their sites. This is why these softwares are now more popular for producing a website than the traditional web developing applications.
Related Posts Related Websites
