2014’s 10 Best Blogging Platforms

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Years before, everyone has a book in them. Now, it’s more appropriate to say that everyone has rants and snarky Facebook updates, infinite tweets, and some random comments to top it off. However, there still are some people who have a thirst for more thoughtful writing and a desire to share it to a wider audience.

Blogs may have slightly fallen out of fashion mainly due to social networks, but there’s something about having your own space on the Web that you can call yours, potentially free from distractions like ads and countless competing status updates.

In today’s article, we’re going to showcase this year’s best blogging platforms for those who are new to blogging and want to get their blog up and running in no time, but are on a tight budget. See what suits you best.

Enjoy!

WordPress

WordPress is no doubt the best and easiest way for you to create a free blog or website. It’s a powerful hosting platform that grows with you. Powering over a fifth of the Web, WordPress lets you quickly create a new blog, with copious amounts of customization options. At first, you might find this platform slightly overwhelming, but once you learn the ropes, you’ll discover that it’s the best option out there, especially for those who want a great mix of power, customization, and usability.

Pen.io

This blogging platform has unique approach compared to its contemporaries. Unusually enough, it doesn’t require you to log in. Instead, you define a URL for a post and set a password. You can drag images into place, and you can create multi-page posts using a tag. It’s a nice option for those who don’t want any personal information stored online.

Svbtle

Svbtle describes itself as “a blogging platform designed to help you think”. It strips everything to the bare essentials, resulting in a bold, stylish, and smooth experience that pushes your message upfront. It’s easy to love this platform for the act of writing, and will certainly appeal to those who prefer simplicity and not a lot of customization options.

Blogger

This ever-popular free blogging platform allows you to sign in with your Google ID so you can have a blog up and running in just seconds, which you can customize with new themes. But take note that it’s a Google service, and we all know how abruptly they sometimes shut things down that many people were happily using.

Postach.io

Postach.io is a user-friendly blogging platform developed by the same folks behind Evernote. That said, it’s deeply integrated into their system. Simply connect a notebook to Postach.io and then tag notes as ‘published’ to make them public. You can also get some customization done, and it comes with a number of themes, the means to embed content from other websites, Disqus commenting, and the options to use Dropbox for storing content.

LiveJournal

Having been around since 1999, this platform is one of the veterans of this list. And because of its age, it somehow blurs the line between blogging and social networking. The result is more of an online community that provides you your own space that also encourages communal interaction. It’s also possible to create something more private, but in order to get the most out of this platform, it’s best to delve into discussion as much as writing.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a popular platform that seems to be a combination of WordPress and Twitter. It offers more scope than Twitter, but tends to favour more brief and concise output than WordPress. There are a lot of mobile apps that make it easy for you to submit content to a Tumblr blog from anywhere, and it’s relatively easy to customize your theme to make it your own. It also has a strong social element to it, via a following model combined with notes and favorites.

Medium

 

This amazing blogging platform has a composing tool that’s truly WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), with the right amount of formatting to tell your stories without getting in the way. It’s simple, beautiful, and collaborative to boot. There are no sidebars, widgets and plugins, and there’s nothing to set up or customize. Once you start writing on this platform, you’ll know that your content will look great on any device and they’ll automatically adjust to the latest technology (and will get even better over time).

Weebly

Weebly is more of a website creation system than simply just a blogging platform. It’s based on drag-and-drop components that allow you to quickly and easily create new pages. Still, blogging is part of the system and you get access to customizable layouts, a number of free themes, and the usual sharing features you’d expect for you to spread your words to the world.

Ghost

This platform is dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It’s well-designed, fully customizable, and completely open source. It lets you write and publish your own blog and provides you with all the right tools to make it easy and fun to do.