Comments on: PC Doctor – Blog Case Study

By: colbert

colbert — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 12:38:23 +0000

I love WordPress 2 too and just getting the hang of Movable Type now. They look different and its tough when you need to go online. So its always better to just try offline blog software like Blogjet and Qumana.

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 07:45:58 +0000

in my opinion too much advertising – the content is almost lost in all these ads, banners and links to books. also some numbers about amount of visitors would be welcomed :)

By: Razib Ahmed

Razib Ahmed — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:18:04 +0000

I am a big fan of blogger for two reasons. First it is free and I do not need to pay anything. Blogger also seems to be fast- may be it is blessed by Google. Secondly, blogger seems to generate traffic easily and also gets indexed by Google very quickly.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 23:25:56 +0000

I don’t know if it is a huge mistake using wordpress as your directory. It might just look a little “legacy like” if they ever change their name. Think Mambo -> Joomla.

By: A.B. Dada

A.B. Dada — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 19:57:08 +0000

Putting /wordpress as your folder IS a big mistake, and something that bloggers need to think about from the get-go. My most popular 3 blogs were on blogspot and had a great pagerank and tons of in-bound links. Blogspot has been driving me nuts for months, so I moved them to new domains and what a pain it was to change everything. Thankfully Feedburner makes it simple to move stuff around :)

I bet there are utilities that will let you change the wordpress directory easily. Look into them, maybe get a blog.domain subdomain for it?

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:05:04 +0000

Great article Adrian. Nice tips and easy to understand and implement.
I will definately be using some of your tips on my next project.

Wish I had started earlier as well.

By: rols

rols — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 17:58:08 +0000

Get tip on not wasting weeks on style and looks but focus on writing and content. I would not have wasted hours and hours trying to add that “next” and previous buttons on my blog only if I had read this before. This is really a very good overall article covering all the important things one would need to create a blog.
Good job.

By: elamr

elamr — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 15:58:53 +0000

I’ve tried Blogharbor, Blogger, typepad, Expression Engine, and Drupal.. but have yet to try WordPress.

Everyone is so positive about WordPress I feel obligated to at least try it especially if it only takes a few minutes to set up. I’ve been looking for a blogging system that is as easy as Typepad/blogware as cost effective as blogger and as powerfull as drupal/expression engine! Is this asking too much?

My experience:
Blogharbor – blogware based about $9/month
pros: easy to use, set up in matter of minutes, GREAT help/support (the best on the net by far). Somehow pulls traffic very fast (almost automatic traffic).
cons: Limited design (No PHP), Heavy traffic will cost you (Probably not built for BoingBoing type traffic).

Blogger – Googles successful Free blog service
pros: cost effective, Google seems to like it (almost automatic traffic), easy walkthrough style set up
cons: limited design (but I’ve seen some very creative blogger designs even with limitations), limited features

Typepad – From Sixapart about 5 dollars/month
pros: feature rich, very cheap, easy to set up
cons: Very limited design, I’ve had trouble getting good traffic with Typepad (perhaps I just need to work at it more).

Expression Engine – Downloadable software about $99 – 250 for license (will need server hosting)
pros: unlimited design potential, beautifully designed code features (once understood), feature rich, really beyond a mere blog (more of content management system
cons: high learning curve (even with predesigned templates), proprietary, fairly new not many default templates.

Drupal – My favorite hackable open source Content Management Software
pros: far beyond just a blog, only limited by your pateints and skills, hundreds of features that can be added, allows users to have there own blog on YOUR blog! very community centric, MySQL/Linux/PHP powered
cons: THE HARDEST LEARNING CURVE, very community centric, features can not be added very easily (some features can conflict with each other), requires programming/Linux and/or other geeky back ground to do really cool stuff.. did I mention that it take patients? have to deal with geeks who only speak Geekaneese and binary. So you ask “Hey Geek, how do I add a trackback to my blog entries?” to which the geek will reply “100100111010100.. and then you enable your module… its easy!?”