There are several free blogging platforms out there, and all of them are good to get started right away. Here’s a quick list of the ones that pop into my head:
- Blogger (by Google)
- Typepad
- Moveable Type
- Live Journal (by Microsoft)
- Drupal
- WordPress
The latter two are Content Management Systems, which makes them more complex than an online diary and ideal for building websites. The others are more like online diaries, but all of them let you jot down some thoughts and share them with others, who in turn can leave their thoughts and comments.
WordPress is different from all the others because it comes in two flavours:
WordPress.com
is a free for all hosted service with a good choice of Layouts (called Themes) and Plugins (those are sidebar widgets and little programmes to add functionality to your blog). You get 5GB of web space and don’t have to worry about finding a web host. You’ll be part of a big blogging community and can start with literally no knowledge of HTML & Co. However, this version is limited in what you can achieve with it.
Then there’s
WordPress.org,
which is the “software” you can install on a web server and expand to whatever you see fit. It works just like the free version, with the advantage that you can add as many Themes and Plugins to it as you like: turn your site into a shopping cart, use it as Framework to build a proper website, or amend the code to your heart’s content. It’s all open source. You’ll have to have your own webspace with MySQL database, a little knowledge about HTML and how to use an FTP client though.
I reccomend signung up for a free account at WordPress.com first and play around with it to get a feel for the platform. You’ll have a URL like yourblog.wordpress.com, but you can add a proper domain (like yourblog.com) for a little bit extra if you want. If it does what you want it to, great! If you find the choice of Themes and Plugins a bit limited, or if you’re looking for a special function you want on your new site, you can always import your posts and pages into a self-hosted version of WordPress later.
The main advantage of a self hosted WordPress over the free version is that you have unlimited control of how your website looks and what it does. Any functionality you can think of, someone’s written a plugin for it. There are hundreds of thousands of designs available, and if you’re comfortable hacking code, you can even build your own Themes and Plugins.
- Need an ecommerce site?
- A unique photo blog?
- Want to automatically post a new picture every so many hours?
- Want to write or take pictures on your mobile, the send it to your site?
In that case, Self hosted is for you.
Hosting is easy to get (Easyspace and 1&1 are good hosts), and I also offer hosting packages specifically for WordPress. You get the latest version pre-installed on my server and automatic core upgrades too. I can use a domain you already own, or register one for you too. Check out Guru Hosting for all that and more.
Plenty of tutorials on how to get started are on WordPress.com, and they even have some cool video tutorials about every aspect of the platform on WordPress.tv.
Happy Blogging 
