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Blogging: Should I use Wordpress, Blogger, or other?

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blogging software, wordpress, blogger, content management system

Here is a question that I have been asked multiple times: What is the best blogging software to use?

I can answer that simply like this: It is up to the user. By far, if you are hosting your site then you need to look at the ease use. These are the questions you should ask yourself:

• What am I going to do with my site?
  
• Am I going to want to add custom programming to it? If you answer yes, can you code php?
• What are the goals of my site?
• How much do I really want to spend to get my site started and found by people looking for the information that I have on my site?
• How much time do I have to promote the site that I am building?

Depending on how you answer those questions, you should start looking for your choices there. Now, let me say this. Wordpress offers an extensive plugin library and an extensive theme library. A lot of people have even purchased themes that let you edit the way that your site looks from the next one. But there are open source versions of code that do the same thing.

I personally do use Wordpress on some of my websites, however, this site is a custom coded content management system that I wrote to meet my own needs. If you can code php, your best option is code the script yourself so that you can be sure it performs to your requirements.

Having coded this script, I have customized it to the point that I get organic traffic daily. I also have coded in an xml sitemap creator and an RSS feed. I have manipulated the php code to look like RSS and XML whenever, in fact, it is a php script that is loading these pages and making them respond in a manner that is viewed as a different file type.

But, again, if you are just getting started, chances are you don't want to spend a lot of money on the site. Especially not until you get the site operational to the point that you are happy with it. And by then, you should already see a steady stream of traffic to your site and have pages indexed by the search engines. (Though this isn't too much of a problem. Even if you can't code, hiring a coder to rewrite your urls to a new location won't cost an arm and leg and can even pay off if you ever decide to change your site's theme, feel, or objectives.)

So, for the person just starting out, I do recommend getting Wordpress because it is extremely versatile. You can use wordpress as a blog or as a content management system, or even better, both. You have the ability to add pages, show your blog posts on a static page (I name mine blog), and remove unwanted pages from showing up (exclude function).

There are also numerous plugins that can give you the ability to add a shopping cart, create sitemaps, add affiliate products and much more.

The problem with Wordpress is with the search engines. I have yet to get a wordpress site to stay at the top of the search engines for my given keyword phrases. I have learned to get the pagerank of a site up, but not to keep the wp pages or posts within the top 10 results.

With my own script, I can not only get a top 10 listing but can keep the top listing forever. So, if you choose to have a custom php script written, I have this script that I have written that works great for search engine listings and gets daily streams of traffic. Contact me for details on how to acquire your own customized copy of it.

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