Read my latest article on Search Marketing Standard which brings design and analytics together into a more palpable infographic (the visual representation of information, including math and statistics, for the rest of us):
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You can also read the translation in Belorussian
If you’re planning on starting a blog, at some point you’ll have to decide whether to host your blog on your own website or on an offsite blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger. Here are the pros and cons to each decision.
Offsite Blogging: The Benefits
The biggest benefit of offsite blogging is that it’s free. A domain name costs about $9 a year, web hosting costs about $5 to $10 a month.
Another benefit is that it’s easier. You don’t have to go through the process of setting up a WordPress (or other platform) blog. You don’t need to go through the process of buying a domain name, setting up your DNS, buying and setting up web hosting, so on and so forth.
For beginning marketers, the difference between free and $20 could be important. New marketers often start out broke, and sometimes have to go through a handful of failed websites before they start making money. Starting on an offsite blogging platform allows beginning marketers to experience making money without risking their own money.
Offsite Blogging: The Drawbacks
There are many drawbacks to offsite blogging. First, it looks less professional. A blog that’s hosted on blogger.com will always look less professional than a blog that’s hosted on your own domain. A less professional looking blog generally means less publicity and likely lower search engine rankings.
Another drawback is that you’re at the whim of someone else’s company. If blogger or WordPress suddenly changes their policy, they can just turn your site off on a whim. This has happened to many bloggers in the past. Basically you’re not in full control of your business.
An offsite blog is less flexible. You can’t install your own custom plugins or themes. You’re pretty much stuck with the designs that the offsite service provides to you. Although WordPress has many beautiful themes to choose from that have great plugins included.
The Comparison: Offsite VS Onsite
Basically, onsite blogging will allow you to get higher rankings, look more professional and most likely be more successful, get more traffic and earn more money in the long run. Offsite blogging allows you to start with no startup costs at all and allows you to bypass the website setup process and get started right away. One quick note: You can’t ever really move an offsite blog to an onsite blog. You’ll lose many of your visitors and all of your search engine rankings.
Which is the best option for you? If you’re just getting started in internet marketing and want to get your feet wet right away, then offsite blogging is a great way to jump in feet first without a high learning curve. You can start blogging within 15 minutes of choosing a topic.
On the other hand, if you already know how to buy a domain or currently have a website, how to setup hosting, how to direct your DNS, etc, and you don’t mind spending the $40.00-$3000.00 (if using a pre-made theme or making a custom theme) in startup costs, then onsite blogging is most likely a better and more profitable option for you in the long run.
I prefer the latter as it has boosted my own domains search engine status and notability in just 2 years which ultimately increased customer loyalty, trustworthiness and sales; all of which is priceless!
By Peter Marino: Senior Partner and CMO of a search engine marketing web design firm in New York City.
If you want to start a blog but don’t feel comfortable writing for it regularly we can set it up, design it and write for you on just about any topic! We have writers from all over the USA and Canada that can write for you, and you get all the credit! Try our blog writing and marketing and see your website soar up in ranking on Google and Bing.
For a long period of time, the enriched-web juggernaut known as Adobe Flash seemed like it would remain the unchallenged king of the proverbial mountain. With the introduction of libraries such as jQuery and MooTools, it seems JavaScript, a once-haggard, much-maligned competitor could be making a comeback in the face of insurmountable odds. So, what is it that has web developers flocking to JavaScript?
JavaScript has several key advantages over Flash that makes it a much more attractive option for developers. The largest determining factor in making the choice between JavaScript and Flash is easily the range of platforms which can display enriched content using one or the other. With the rise in popularity of smart phones and the paradigm shift to a focus on mobile web, delivering content to mobile users has become a priority for many web developers. There are very few mobile devices which handle Flash well, if at all. Apple’s iPhone, iPod, and iPad, at the time of this publishing, cannot display Flash content at all and Steve Jobs’ highly-publicized comments about Flash suggest it may never be able to. Recent reviews of Flash’s first appearances on Android paint a bleak picture of poorly-functioning Flash videos and unplayable Flash games. Neither Sony’s PlayStation 3 nor PSP support Flash entirely. On the contrary, all of these platforms support JavaScript. Although JavaScript’s ability to deliver enriched content to so many platforms is the most often cited and publicized advantage, JavaScript offers several other upsides in areas where Flash falls flat. Developing in Flash can get costly, Adobe’s Flash software is not cheap and many independent developers and small-to-medium businesses simply cannot afford to purchase it or the developers. JavaScript offers further savings in the form of reduced bandwidth. Additionally, the concept of graceful degradation is alien to Flash developers. Either your program works or it doesn’t. JavaScript offers options for a well-coded page to degrade gracefully. Flash also offers little in the way of options for interacting with search engines, while JavaScript plays very well with Google and its like. Lastly, the Flash learning curve is steep and can be quite daunting for newcomers to the realm of web development, but JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and MooTools can make learning JavaScript a much more pleasant experience. With so much going in favor of JavaScript, can we, like Steve Jobs, argue that Flash is dead? Not quite.
Flash still has several areas where it outshines and outperforms JavaScript by orders of magnitude. Flash is so feature-rich that it is hard to find anything that can compete with the dizzying number of features it can offer. Also, Flash handles three-dimensional graphics much better than JavaScript. To JavaScript’s detriment, it offers its own set of problems, such as the innate ability in modern browsers to disable JavaScript support and the inability for developers to protect their source code.
Returning to the original question posed by this article: Is JavaScript making a comeback? Definitely. Expect to see more enriched content optimized for mobile devices, with graphics that can render within mobile browsers while using as little bandwidth as possible. JavaScript is the currently the best way to do both of these things at the same time. Flash, however will not be put out to pasture quite yet as its continued usefulness is undeniable.
This article was first published in Website Magazine by Peter Marino, Senior Partner and CMO of the NYC Web Design Firm reelWebDesign.com
Read my latest article on Search Marketing Standard about Google TV and how it will change media and how we interface with it:
http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/google-tv-the-end-of-linear-pixel-slop.