Jay Hollingum - Works in IT

A recent project needed to get on-line quickly, easily, cheaply and with minimal effort. The site had to be able to be administered easily by non-tech types and also contain a few features such as a blog, contact forms, the ability to include custom HTML for Twitter feeds, PayPal, sharing links, etc., etc. http://www.weebly.com A number of options would fit these parameters, and obviously a content management system of some sort would be ideal. Installing, configuring, finding and paying for a host can be troublesome at times, which led me to Weebly - an on-line Content Management System with free hosting, no set up fees or issues, feature rich and easy user interface. You can pay for a pro version which gives the usual obvious benefits of own domain (instead of subdomain of Weebly), better stats (but you can just plug in your own Google Analytics code), a couple more features to include on your website, removal of the Weebly link in the footer .... anyway, ...

So the time has come to move to a more advanced blog engine for my blog. blogger.com , Google's blogging service, has served me well. It's incredibly easy to use and to get started with, along with having some great features such as inbuilt stats; however now I need a few more advanced features and greater control over the blog. There's a vast array of blog engines out there, some free, some paid for, some hosted, some self-hosted, and picking which one is best or the right choice could be a little bit tricky. This article from Mashable lists most of the main options and bigger players -  http://mashable.com/2007/08/06/free-blog-hosts/ . There are a few parameters that I've kind of decided on Ease of installation/compatibility and support with web hosts Simple to use. I don't want to spend ages clicking around just to add a post or format it. Feature rich and well supported. Most blog engines should have a fairly standard set of features now such RSS/ATOM fe...