The Best Blog Platform for Small Business Owners

By: Small Business Finance Forum on 11:00 AM

The picture says it all!

I think the best blog platform for small businesses, hands down, is Wordpress. You need no coding experience and none to very minor html knowledge to build a beautiful blog on Wordpress. (If you are paying someone to run your website or have a coding background, my recommendation differs. However, for the typically small business owner managing his or her own site or having an employee whose primary job is something else manage the site, Wordpress is the simplest and has the most associated tools.)

• Over the last few years I have also used Blogger (Google’s blog platform), Wix, Tumblr, LiveJournal, and a few others. But none of these compare to Wordpress for ease of use, designability, and options. All of my company’s related blogs and sites are built on Wordpress, except for one (this blog, as a matter of fact), which still uses Blogger. Blogger was the first true blog platform I ever tried.

• Wordpress offers thousands of free, easy-to-use themes that allow you to build a website or blog for almost free, except for the cost of your domain and hosting. Themes provide the general design and layout for your site. Many of these themes come with video instructions on how to install, set up, and use the themes. Regarding domain and hosting costs, you can even avoid these by hosting your website on Wordpress’ own servers and have a domain name that includes “wordpress.com”. However, I believe having your own company-specific site name looks more professional.

One example of a Wordpress theme. (There are hundreds.)

• Wordpress has thousands of free plug-ins that provide various functionality to a blog including SEO (search engine optimization), share buttons, contact forms, site protection, spam protection, and much more. As with the themes, many of the plug-in providers/developers offer free video tutorials on how to use these plug-ins.

• There are many developers and companies that provide higher-end themes and plug-ins with more functionality for a relatively low cost, i.e., $20 to $200. With these you can build a blog that really stands out for fractions of what it would cost to hire a developer to build one from scratch.

• Finally, Wordpress has so many users and developers that you can easily find web development personnel and access expertise that can solve almost any problem or issue you’ll encounter with your website.

Do you disagree with my recommendation? Agree? Please share your comments below.