Talk About Blogging

Last Saturday, I gave a short, informal meeting/talk about blogging. I had volunteered to fix up a site for an organization (I’ll mention and promote it here when we do get things up and running). Armed with my trust laptop, hungry for lunch, and still a bit sleepy, I spoke about the pros and cons of coding your own site versus running a blogging software such as wordpress.org. I’m talking about installing one on your host rather than operating it out of wordpress.com.

Here’s a rundown of the list of pros and cons of free hosting, running wordpress, coding your own site. Based on the hierarchy of this list, you’d know I was gunning for WP.

1. Running Wordpress on your own host

Pros:

• Your content writers do not need to know HTML, CSS, and all that technical mumbo-jumbo. They can concentrate on writing.
• Your IT person (in this case, me) can concentrate on SEO and promoting the site.
• You can personalize the site using widgets and themes and even design your own theme.

Cons:

• A few hundred buck per month.
• Commitment from your content writers.

2. Running Wordpress on Wordpress.com

Pros:

• You don’t have to spend for hosting.

Cons:

• Your site would look like a thousand other sites because of the limited widgets and templates you can choose from.
• You can’t control all the elements on your site.

3. Coding your own site and running it on geocities or on any other free hosting.

Pros:

• Free

Cons:

• Limited bandwidth
• You’re going to spend a lot of time on coding those pages.
• Advertisements will always be there.
• You’d have to do a lot of things by yourself.
• Coding the site would also mean reinventing the wheel.

The audience was a mix of people from the academe, a banker, the head of the organization, some other professionals. There were different concerns such as:

Academe: If I want my student to access my own site for my lessons, can I also have the same thing?

Yes, you might want to look into using a free version of wordpress. You’d still need to type in your lessons in word and then convert them to .pdf, as the formulas and special characters might be more difficult to type into the wordpress editor.

Organization head: Is there market for this site? We used to to forwarding of articles through email, how effective would this be versus that? How about the cost?

First off, blogging is the new medium of newscasting. It can be as personal or impersonal as you want it. Some big companies even use it to run their corporate updates site. See Universal Robina.

Second, as a person who frequently deletes email that is irrelevant at the moment and someone who looks for content and articles online, it is beneficial to have articles stored on a site that specializes on certain topics. Having an online repository of articles where people can comment bring about a tighter community. It means that for those subscribed to that list or those who regularly visit that blog, people can be easily reached just as email, sans the spam.

Last, perhaps the most unbelievable is that people make a living blogging. It may be hard to believe at first, but there are people who earn a whole lot more than I do for my day job with their blogs. A few fellow Pinays and Pinoys have broke the $100 mark for Google Adsense. I have yet to break the $20 point with my more than 3-year adsense account.