A big reason for WordPress’ popularity is its easy-to-use administration interface. However, for some users (especially non-technical people), creating posts and pages using the...
The post The 9 Best WordPress Front End Editing Plugins appeared first on WPExplorer.
Here on ProBlogger, we’ve always recommended self-hosted WordPress (aka WordPress.org) as the very best platform for blogging.
And with good reason.
Many of the world’s largest blogs and websites run on self-hosted WordPress. Thousands of plugins and themes are available – many for free, although there are lots of premium options too.
And a self-hosted blog gives you full control and plenty of flexibility.
But for some bloggers, self-hosted WordPress might not be the best choice.
You may just want a blog you can use as a personal diary or writing outlet. You may not have the budget for buying domain names and hosting. Even if you do, the thought of settin them up and installing WordPress may seem overwhelming.
Sound like you? Then you may want to look at other options.
(That being said, if you want to build a profitable blog then choose the self-hosted option so you don’t have to migrate everything down the track.)
Although there are other platforms that you can install on your own website (where you pay for a hosting account through sites such as Bluehost, Siteground and WPEngine),
But in this article we’ll be looking at hosted blogging platforms.
With hosted blogging platforms, the company hosts your site on their servers – just as Facebook and Twitter let you set up pages and accounts on their sites. And if you want a custom domain name, you can register it through them too.
Which means you can get all the advice, help and support you need from one place–the blogging platform company.
The five platforms we’re covering in today’s post are:
But before we start, keep in mind that your site could disappear from any of these platforms if:
Find it at: WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a good choice if you’re thinking of upgrading to WordPress.org (self-hosted WordPress) in the future. It functions like a cut-down version of the self-hosted WordPress, and you can transfer your blog from one to the other. Here are WordPress’ instructions on how to do it.
WordPress launched in 2003, and the company is not only well established but also well regarded in the blogging world.
Here are the different WordPress plans and their features.
Find it at: Blogger.com
If you want to set up a simple blog quickly, Blogger might be the best choice. It has limited features (which can be a drawback), but it can also be helpful if you don’t want to be overwhelmed by choices.
They offer only a free, basic plan: you can’t upgrade to anything fancier. Again, this could be a drawback or an advantage depending on your blogging needs.
Blogger (aka BlogSpot) is one of the longest-running major blog platforms. It’s been around since 1999, and was acquired by Google in 2003. If you already have a Google account, you simply log in with that and create your blog.
Find it at: Wix.com
Wix has a simple drag-and-drop interface so you can easily design your pages. If you find WordPress and Blogger daunting or confusing, Wix could be what you’re looking for. It’s designed to create websites rather than blogs specifically, so it’s not so blog-focused as WordPress and Blogger.
Wix was founded in 2006, and acquired DeviantArt (a popular online community for artists) in February 2017.
Find it at: Weebly.com
Like Wix, Weebly has a drag-and-drop interface with lots of flexibility to help you design your website. Also like Wix (and Blogger), you can’t use third-party plugins to extend your site’s functionality.
But unlike Wix, Weebly lets you use third-party themes (templates) that you can change at any time – even once you’ve created your website. So if you have trouble committing to a design, or you want to try out lots of options before you making your final choice, Weebly might well be a better choice than Wix.
Weebly was founded in 2006, and launched in 2007.
Find it at: SquareSpace.com
SquareSpace is the only platform on our list that doesn’t have a free plan. Their cheapest is the “Personal” plan at $144/year.
That might put you off immediately. But SquareSpace could still be a good option, so don’t rule it out. (They have a 14-day free trial, so you can try before you commit.)
Like Wix and Weebly, SquareSpace has a drag-and-drop content editor that’s easy to use. If you don’t feel confident with the technology of blogging, it may be a good option for you. While you’re limited to their templates (which can only be customised to a certain degree), SquareSpace’s templates look very professional and slick.
When it comes to blogging there’s no one-size-fits-all. And if you’ve ruled out self-hosted WordPress as an option, any of these platforms could be a good fit for you.
If you want to set up a simple website quickly with a drag-and-drop interface that lets you position different elements on your page, Weebly is probably your best option. It’s cheaper than Wix if you need more than the 500MB storage space. And you can change themes at any time. (Still, if you love a particular Wix template it might be worth going with Wix.)
If your focus is on the blog itself, and you’re happy to spend time getting to grips with the interface, Blogger is a simple and straightforward option. And even though it’s free, it still has a lot of features.
If you plan on switching to self-hosted WordPress in the future, opting for WordPress.com now will make the transition much smoother in terms of both moving your content over and your own learning curve.
SquareSpace is widely recognised as having great designs. But that comes at a cost, as there’s no free option. But if you need a premium plan regardless, you might want to go with SquareSpace for its quality designs.
Ultimately, what matters more than your choice of platform is getting your blog online. You could spend months researching and trying different platforms without ever having a live blog.
Blogs can (and do) succeed on a variety of different platforms. If self-hosted WordPress isn’t for you, then any of these options could serve you well. Try a couple that seem promising, and then pick your favourite and stick with it.
I’ll give the last word to Paul Cunningham from Left Brain Blogging, who wrote a great reply to a blogger struggling to choose a platform in our ProBlogger Community group on Facebook last year (emphasis mine):
I know you’ve been struggling with these platform questions for a while so I’m going to give you straight advice. My main concern is that you’ll get so stuck on this decision that it’s going to delay the real progress you’re trying to make.
Go sign up for a free SquareSpace trial. Mess around with the interface and make a few dummy posts or pages. Do stuff you’d normally do, like add an image, or set up a sidebar. Spend an hour on it.
If you like it more than WordPress, then use it. Otherwise use WordPress. Your choice of platform has to be something you’re willing to use and that doesn’t hold you back with technical limitations.
But here’s the bottom line. WordPress is successful for a reason. Whether you like the interface or not, there’s no denying the benefits of going with the mature, large community, feature rich, and deeply customizable platform in WordPress.
What blogging platform do you use?
Photo credit: Christian Stahl
The post When DIY Blogging isn’t for You: 5 Alternatives to Self-Hosted WordPress appeared first on ProBlogger.
There’s a lot of work to be done when your website is up and running – content creation, maintenance, security...
The post 10 Ways to Automate WordPress Tasks on Your Site appeared first on WPExplorer.
As cryptocurrencies are becoming more and more popular, the idea of accepting Bitcoin (and other digital currencies) on your WordPress...
The post How to Accept Bitcoin Payments with WordPress appeared first on WPExplorer.
Last month we launched our very first ProBlogger course. After a whirlwind few weeks (months, actually ), I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a bit of what happened behind the scenes while creating the Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog course.
To say it’s been a long time coming is a bit of an understatement. We’re constantly asked why we don’t offer courses, as it seems like the most obvious thing we should be doing. Our focus has always been on offering great value that’s easily accessible, whether it’s our free blog posts, podcasts or world class (yet very reasonably priced) events.
All of which takes up a huge chunk of time and dedication from our small team.
We’ve been thinking about courses for a while now, and our goal is to create a blogging course unlike any other. Something that goes beyond the that goes beyond the prescriptive “this is how I did it” approach that doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.
And so we created the Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog course, and made it available for free.
But this is just the beginning. We have many more courses in the pipeline, and together they’ll help you piece together the best approach to blogging for you.
Our first course starts at the beginning – how to start a blog. Actually, it starts even earlier in the process, as one of the first things the course asks is whether you should even start a blog.
That’s one of the reasons our first course is totally free. We don’t want you buying a course on how to blog if you find out blogging just isn’t for you. We also don’t advocate investing too much in getting your blog set up.
But we strongly suggest having a solid base (your own domain and a self-hosted site) so it’s easier to progress if you decide to stick with it.
So, the first course provides a lot of guidance about:
All up there are seven steps. And while it’s basic it’s also quite comprehensive – at least for a free course.
This was our beta launch, which we ran in the lead up to our self-proclaimed International Start a Blog Day on February 7th – a day to celebrate starting a new blog in a new year.
We get a lot of people asking us how we created the course site. So here’s the breakdown in case you’re looking for a possible way to launch your own.
The content for the course is a mix of repurposed content from our blog, podcast and events, along with new content created specifically for the course. So we spent a lot of time editing existing audio, creating accompanying slides and converting them to videos, as well as creating new worksheets and other downloadable resources.
At first we were a bit worried about repurposing existing content. But when we realised how much work it is to a) find it in the first place, and b) organise it into a comprehensive easy-to-follow course, we were glad to have these resources to draw on and add the extra value of convenience and structure for our readers.
We have a separate WordPress installation for our courses site, which sits on a different server to our main blog and podcast site installations. Here’s what our ‘stack’ looks like.
Learndash – we like how this solution is both comprehensive and easy to use.
Social Learner – incorporating Buddypress elements for community features (we don’t use all of them), this theme provides a good looking layout for the modules and lessons. We also used Thrive Architect (which works nicely with Social Learner) to build some of the extra content elements into our pages.
WPFusion – this is an elegant plugin that lets us easily control access to content based on tags specified in Drip for our course members.
We use Campaigns in Drip to automatically onboard course members after they’ve either filled out one of our Thrive Leads opt-ins or registered directly through the site.
Whilst the first course has been free, we’ll use our existing e-Commerce solution Easy Digital Downloads to process payments and pass information to Drip and the courses site via WPFusion.
Forum/Group
While our setup has the option for a forum, groups and comments (we turned comments on for some of the modules), we elected to run a Private Facebook Group for the first intake of students. Partly to test one against the other, but mainly so we could get students’ feedback on the course as they progressed through. It also served as a customer service channel.
We won’t be maintaining an ongoing group for the course throughout the year (course members can join our main Facebook group at problogger.com/group). But we will run one in conjunction with International Start a Blog Day each year.
Building awareness, and the call to action to sign up for our Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog course, was done primarily through the ProBlogger podcast, along with a sales page and a couple of articles on the blog.
Over the Christmas and New Year period, we changed how we did the ProBlogger podcast to generate interest in starting a blog and the course we were launching. Instead of a weekly podcast, we released a series of 12 shorter podcasts (one each weekday). And is each episode we shared a different blogger’s story about how they started their blog and how far they’ve come. These stories were told by ProBlogger podcast listeners who submitted their stories as audio files. This series of podcasts has one of the highest levels of engagement of any I’ve released. In each podcast there are calls to action to sign up for the course via the sales page on the blog.
The sales page for the Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog course had an easy-to-communicate URL (problogger.com/startablog/), and a snappy design created using Thrive Architect. We linked to it in our “Start a Blog” section of the blog, as well as in a couple of articles we wrote about a starting a blog in the New Year.
Knowing that most of our audience had already started a blog, we asked people to share the information about our new course. We asked our existing readers to share it with those they knew who may be interested in starting a blog. We also asked the people who signed up for the course to share it with their friends.
Trying to launch anything early in the year can be tricky, especially when everyone in the southern hemisphere is typically on summer holidays. Like many course creators, we were still creating content and making the site look and work the way we wanted right up to the deadline.
We had team members holidaying in different time zones with bad wi-fi issues and sick kids. Some last minute re-recording of tutorials had Laney chasing away noisy dogs and throwing sticks into trees to scare away squawking birds. (We have some pretty obnoxious birds in Australia.)
It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. But we kind of made our launch date (I’m sure we made it in a timezone somewhere in the world). And the actual launch happened without too many hiccups other than some people having activation issues because they clicked the link more than once.
The main takeaway? Don’t expect everything to go smoothly, keep your cool, and prepare to work hard when it counts.
We were blown away by the response. We knew there would be some, but given our readers have mostly started blogs already, it was hard to know just how many students we might get.
Sometimes you just have to trust your gut and go for it.
By the time it went live, almost 5,000 people had signed up for the course. Of these, roughly half went on to enrol in the course once it was launched, and half of those started the course (a little more than 1,000 students).
In the time between launching the course (January 10) and International Start a Blog Day (February 7), more than 1,000 new subscribers had signed up for the course. By the time February 7 came around, more than 2,000 students had started the Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog course. More than 100 new blogs were launched in time for International Start a Blog Day, with many more launched since. You can check them out here.
And there were other positive outcomes too.
We ended up with more than 1,000 members in the beta Facebook Group, which gave us very useful environment for getting direct feedback from students as they were trying out the course. We learned a lot about:
International Start a Blog Day was also a very rewarding experience for me and the ProBlogger team. We got to really see and celebrate the course outcomes for the many students who launched new blogs as a result. We loved compiling the honor roll of new blogs – exploring their sites, reading people’s stories, and seeing how they put their learning into practice.
And we now have a very comprehensive opt-in that helps us identify people we can help on their blogging journey. Best of all, they’ve shown they have the drive to take action, which makes it even easier for us to help them succeed.
In March we’ll be launching our first paid course – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog – the successor to the ever popular book of the same name. The course version includes:
For more information, and to sign up as one the first students to sign up for the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course, visit courses.problogger.com/courses/31-days-to-build-a-better-blog/.
We’re also reviewing the feedback we’ve received from the beta Start a Blog course group to help tweak and improve that course for future students.
Have you launched a course recently? How did it go for you?
The post Behind the Scenes of ProBlogger’s First Course Ever appeared first on ProBlogger.
Bill Cunningham, a legendary Times fashion photographer once said: “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life.”...
The post 25+ Best Fashion WordPress Themes for Blogs & Shops appeared first on WPExplorer.
