Business and Blogging

Blogging Platforms - Part 6 - Support

by Des Walsh on March 15th, 2007

In this sixth post in the Blogging Platforms series, we look at one of the key issues to be considered in choosing a blogging platform, the kind of support available and its reliability.

The possibly self-evident assumption in this post is that a user of a paid, hosted service should be able to expect more complete, consistent and prompt support than the user of free software. And that would apply to issues of setup and administration, as well as help desk type support for problems along the way.

There are quite a few free blogging platforms on offer, especially for the solo or small business user. And given the usual interest of solo and small business owners in keeping overheads as low as possible, the prospect of having a quite sophisticated platform free is clearly attractive. But it needs to be recognized in a business context that, whether the business is solo-operated or has a larger profile, choosing a “free” blogging platform can entail a lot of demand being made on time and expertise. Business owners who do not have that expertise and delegate the responsibility to a staff member need to monitor the situation to ensure that the staff member’s time is not being taken up unduly in “getting educated” on company time. Business owners who do not have the expertise and decide to upskill themselves in this department need to acknowledge that time is money and do a cost-benefit analysis.

That said, a solo business owner, just starting out with a new, bootstrapped operation, may have sufficient technical know-how, or willingness and capacity to learn, to become expert in setting up, configuring and maintaining an open source, free blogging software platform, such as is provided by WordPress.org, or Drupal, where the support is provided, to mixed effect, by a more or less keen and knowledgeable community of volunteers. Whereas another solo business owner, or the owner of a microbusiness or small business, who does not have the technical knowledge, or the time or willingness to learn, may well be advised to use a fully hosted, paid service, such as Typepad, or BlogHarbor or Squarespace.

I use the term “fully hosted” to indicate a service for which a monthly or annual fee is required. “Fully hosted’ in my book means that if you have a problem you are not dependent on searching a volunteer forum and hoping to find a clue as to how you can solve a problem. It means you can email or even phone support and know that it is in their commercial interest to solve your problem as well as they can, as soon as they can. They know that you can shift your blog to another provider overnight, if you so choose. (In terms of categories, that makes WordPress.com a bit of an exception – it is hosted, but not to the same extent as a paid service: just for the moment I’ll leave it where it is in the mindmap for this series).

Apart from any special requirements, such as a company-specific graphic design, for a small business the cost of a decision to go with a fully hosted, commercial service could initially be easily less than $100 a year, as indicated in the third in this series of posts on blogging platforms.

For larger, more complex organizations, there is similarly a range of choices, from such open source products as WordPressMU or Drupal to the hosted “price to be discussed” options such as Blogtronix, iUpload or IBM Lotus Connections. We will take a look at some of those options in the next post of this Blogging Platforms series.

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POSTED IN: Blogging Platforms, General, Resources