CCAR Help :: Technical Training and Support

The platform

Now that you have learned a bit about the blog, and thought about your prospective relationship with your blog (your niche, committment, topic, brand, etc), you need to decide where to start blogging. If you are already blogging somewhere, you may now be in a position to upgrade your blog platform.

Don’t get trapped into feeling that you need to get it all done, all ‘right,’ immediately. As with your theme/topic/brand, your blog platform may well (and probably should) evolve over time. Hopping from platform to platform is neither easy nor fun, so there are real advantages to taking small, explorative steps as you increase your confidence level in what you want to commit to.

The assumption of this course is that you are considering blogging as a potentially important part of your business model. Blogging can be a very fun hobby, but our focus is a little more serious and professional. As such, we will assume that you will be willing to allocate some budget to your blog and its platform and positioning.

While much of this ‘budget’ is measured in time and effort, there is also the potential for some modest dollar costs. Think of your blog as your baby. You are about to give birth to that baby and observe its life. Your choice of a platform plays a large role in determining the type of life your blog will have, and the cost of that life.

Free or ‘hosted’ platforms (blogger.com, wordpress.com, activerain, Inman.com, etc) are a great way to get started and experiment. You can get the blog setup, hosted and a name (a subdomain like ccarhelp.wordpress.com) for free. In short, the free option gives you a quick, easy setup that is often free and maintained centrally by professionals. They also typically have much more weight or presence online than your own standalone web platform implementation might. Of course, the traffic that weight brings gets divided among the many hosted blogs there. Still, your blog will also inherently be easier to find on search engines compared to a brand new standalone blog, at least initially.

By their nature, however, free solutions are homogenous and lack the flexibility and adaptability that we equate with a ‘quality’ life.

On the other end of the spectrum is the stand alone platform. This is a website that you maintain (or a webmaster/hosting provider maintains for you) that is yours alone. The web blog is implemented on this host.

For example, ccarhelp.com, this blog site, is a stand alone platform implementation. The domain name ccarhelp.com is owned by CCAR. That name points to a webserver that CCAR maintains (the server can and usually is a shared server with any other websites on it, but most users never know this). The ccarhelp.com website content (this blog) sits within a wordpress installation on that server (basically a folder named ccarhelp with a database connection and the installed wordpress architecture). This setup provides complete control. I choose the theme, the packages that are downloaded and installed as plugins, the security, etc.

That all sounds rather complicated, but with the advent of modern, packaged platforms like wordpress, it is really rather simple. There is a cost, in dollars and time, but it is not large. It is, however, ongoing. You cannot just install a platform like this and forget about it. Updates need to be applied from time to time, customizations need to be done, often a reorganization of the whole structure is required as you learn how to better approach your setup.

If you have some degree of technical aptitude and knowledge, this can be a rewarding pursuit. The wordpress ‘famous 5 minute install’ really takes less than that, if you have everything ready. If you are not technically inclined, then you may want to either opt for the hosted solution, or get professional assistance through your webmaster and/or hosting provider.

Summing it all up

links to blog platform reviews