Guest post by Russell Jensen.
As the weblog trend becomes a common practice across the web, having a blog presence for your business is almost essential to increase visibility and build your brand. If you are new to content management systems and blog platforms, the choices may seem overwhelming. Here are our top five blog platforms and the features they offer to identify the best structure for your site.
1. WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) for bloggers. As of January 2012, W3Techs reported that WordPress holds claim to a whopping 53.9 percent of the content management system demand. The WordPress platform is free, making it cost effective for any budget. Whether you host a WordPress blog yourself or establish a platform on the WordPress site, you have access to a variety of tools and features.
This CMS focuses on a user-friendly platform with an administration panel that is easy to navigate. You can control every component of your WordPress blog from this panel, including adding pages, modules and plug-ins. The open source design encourages development, making plug-ins and upgrades widely available. With a nearly endless array of themes available for the novice user and accessible CSS style sheets for the coding professional, you can customize almost every aspect of the look of your WordPress site.
2. Joomla
The second most popular CMS, according to the W3Techs usage statistics, is the Joomla platform with nearly 10 percent of the total demand. Joomla is also an open source and free of charge.
Known for being easy to use and navigate, Joomla offers a variety of templates and customizations from multiple contributor libraries. In fact, Joomla boasts over 6,000 plugins available for the platform. Built on a Javascript framework, Joomla caches pages for rapid page loads. Users rate Joomla as easier to use than some platforms, but second to WordPress.
3. Drupal
Drupal holds slightly less than seven percent of the CMS market. Drupal’s platform allows you to manage several different sites, even in multiple languages. You can create multiple levels of menus for navigation support, and select from several of the most common database platforms. The overall site function resembles that of Joomla with only a few functionality differences.
Drupal sites are not as user-friendly as WordPress or Joomla for site owners, but it is customizable and allows you to create SEO-friendly URLs for your pages. The SEO tools make it easier to land in search results, increasing visibility to your site. You can find over 7,000 plugins and modifications from many developer sites to help you customize your Drupal platform.
4. DotNetNuke
DotNetNuke is another of the open source options and ranks immediately after Drupal in the weekly downloads. Based on .NET structure, there are well over 8,000 apps available for the DotNetNuke platform. With language packs to support 60 languages, DotNetNuke will help you create a site for virtually any country.
You can customize your DotNetNuke appearance with one of a wide variety of skins available from many developers. You can even contract a developer to custom-build a skin for your specific platform, though a fee will certainly apply.
Slightly bulky and code-heavy, this platform is not as light as some other options. One convenience to the DotNetNuke structure is the automatic upgrades, saving you the hassle of having to install upgrades when released.
5. Blogger
Holding almost an equivalent market share to DotNetNuke, Blogger is Google’s answer to the weblog market. Google offers a variety of templates you can select for your Blogger site, but you are limited to the options available from Google. There is no code access for the Blogger sites.
Google does most of the hard work for you with the Blogger design. You create your blog, choose your domain and Google hosts it for you. If you want to have a platform designed without having to establish a hosting account and manage the back-end files, Blogger is a turnkey platform. Google also offers tools to automate Google ad revenue.
It is clear from the wide variety of options available in the open source marketplace that there is little reason to invest thousands of dollars in a custom-built content management system unless you have outgrown your current open source site. When you are starting out with a new blog and building a brand identity, start with one of these highly functional tools without the high price tag.
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