I would like to start a Blog but don’t really know where to start. I would like it to look professional but yet be cheap and easy to setup would it be best to get a URL and host it myself or go with one of the free sites.

Thanks for your help in advance!

have you got anything interesting to say?

I would use WordPress, but on your own site (ie your own domain, not a ‘free’ domain) so that it looks more professional.

http://www.machinenetworks.co.uk/webhosting/wordpress/

These guys have a script included in hosting, that in one click installs WordPress.

Its then relatively easy to find ‘skins’ (looks) for the site for free, or paid.
You can alo get various plug ins and add ons, again most of which are drag n drop a file to make it all work.

One I did earlier…waiting for content…
http://neil-may.org.uk/

Somehow I read the title as “Starting the borg”, bit confusing!

I agree with matt_outandabout; wordpress makes life really, really easy and there are plenty of hosting solutions that have it bolted on as standard!

Well jam bo I’m going to try my best to be interesting but we’ll have to see if I can manage it. I’m thinking of setting up a Yorkshire restaurant blog. I eat out at least once a week and thought it might be interesting to put my thoughts into a blog. It’s just for fun.

Thank matt_outandabout I’ve heard of Word press but haven’t really looked at.

WordPress is easiest IME, and has biggest variety of looks/plugins etc, and forum support is great.

Add in being able to blog onto it from http://www.scribefire.com/ or even a separate browser (I used http://flock.com/ and set it up so that I blogged and uploaded pics etc all from that browser, it was ‘work’. Firefox then remains as ‘fun’)

http://www.posterous.com

I’ve got one on Blogspot. Pretty simple to set up and easy to customise. You can sign up using any email address (mine is linked to a Tiscali account).

It’s easy to post photos, link to Flickr etc. and you can have as many or as few “gadgets” as you want.

Mine is here

Thanks Brant I was just on Greatrock’s Posterous site as I was looking at booking some skills sessions with him and http://www.great-rock.co.uk seems to be down at the moment.

Thanks stuartie_c I do like the look of Blogspot

I think I’m going to try out the free Posterous and Blogspot and then taking it from there if I’m enjoying posting move onto WordPress.

Yeah. Actually, wordpress rocks. And Ed has a blog there too – http://greatbigrock.wordpress.com/ – that still works 🙂

Posterous is something I found at the weekend that is ace for banging stuff out to twitter, flickr and wordpress blogs with. if it could start threads here too that’d be even better 🙂

oooh, I like that posterous….