Blogging Platforms for Associations

Why I picked Blogger as my platform.

I picked it because it was fast, flexible, and free. I looked at Wordpress, Moveable Type, and a few others. Blogger seemed like less messing around. I was up and running with a simple blog mapped to ftp my own domain in less than 30 minutes. It was a good choice. You can turn off the Blogger navbar to give your site a more professional look. Template edits are easy from a template window with preview. I really like the easy interface. A huge plus is being able to access your Adwords, Google Analytics, Alerts, Webmaster tools, and Groups from the same dashboard as your Blogger menu.

I've used open source platforms like Geeklog in the past for community sites. Lots of great capabilities, but the constant upgrades, security fixes were a pain. Russian spam gangs finally brought that site to its knees. I recently deleted 6,000 comment spam submissions.

If you are a large association, you can probably afford money and staff to use more complex platforms. For the small association with limited resources, I think Blogger is the way to go.