I get no less than 2 or 3 requests a week from friends asking what my recommendation is for them to setup their own personal website or blog to showcase their family photos or post entries to the web.  I usually point them to a few sites like Blogger or WordPress.org, that I have some experience with and know that they are quality online products.  Both of these sites are free and pretty easy to deploy and maintain.  With these free blog solutions there are a few considerations that I like to point out.

Domain Names

When you sign up for these free blog type websites you typically get a domain name that can be easy for others to forget.  For instance, http://cottonrohrscheib.blogspot.com.  Plus, I am not for sure that there are any guarantees that this will always be your domain name.  I would think that these services would reserve the right to force name changes on their users with very little if any notice at all.

When you utilize a company like Pleth to develop and host your blog or personal website we usually will build the site on a domain that you (the client) owns.  For example: http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com.  This domain belongs to me and will always belong to me.  I will likely never change this domain name since I have a history on this domain and that’s where all of my friends have me bookmarked.  This is probably the biggest difference between having a firm like Pleth build your blog or going with one of these free services and should be considered carefully.

Plugins and Technical Assistance

With free blog solutions out there you typically have access to a wealth of Plugins that can be deployed and maintained with little or no technical knowledge.  With that being said, there are still some Plugins out there, for wordpress especially, that require various levels of technical knowledge, sometimes php scripts have to be modified to work correctly with these Plugins.  When you have your blog built by Pleth you have access to our developers to assist you in deploying Plugins and further extending your blog to add features like photo galleries, etc.  Of course our developers charge an hourly fee for doing these updates, but at the end of the day this is a lot easier to justify than spending hours on a support forum or developers community looking for support and then still having to do your maintenance yourself.

These are just two of the things that I often bring up to my friends who ask me for suggestions prior to establishing their own personal website.  I have nothing in the world against these free services, I think that they serve their purpose on the web and fill a void that was there a few years before they came upon the scene.  At Pleth we typically service Small Business and Enterprise Level Development projects that consist of custom applications.  With that being said that doesn’t mean that we don’t occasionally take on high level blog projects for political candidates, musicians, authors, etc., we even develop corporate blogs for our clients from time to time as add-ons to their existing web presence. 

If you are serious about establishing a personal website or blog, please feel free to contact us regarding your project and we would be more than happy to discuss your project and give you a quote for developing your project.