The Great Blog Gap

Now that I’m 6 months into my blogging career (and I use the term losely) I’ve come to a crossroads.  I want more from my blog site than my blog site provider, Wordpress, offers beginners via wordpress.com and I’m not quite technical enough to be able to jump right into the more technical skills that wordpress seems to require for more feature rich sites via wordpress.org.  First, some background on what is available and what you can do with it. 

For those of you who don’t know Wordpress.com   it is a very simple, and easy to use online toolset that allows you to be up and running with a simple blog very quickly.  This site is built on wordpress.com and over the last 6 months I’ve come to enjoy the fact that I can concentrate on the editorial content of my site, still having a few stylistic choices, and not have to worry about hosting, domain registration, and web design.  However, I have increasingly been looking to add more features, more capability and more personal style to my site.  While the free capabilities of wordpress.com were great for me when I knew nothing more than that I wanted to voice an opinion online I am now feeling a bit restricted by its lack of customisation. 

That brings us to the more advanced Wordpress option found at Wordpress.org.  To be honest, I’ve already stepped up to this option and am now questioning if it was the right move.  Let me explain; In order to have more choice in styles, themes, functionality, metrics tracking, security and the option to monetise my site, I needed to secure and purchase a domain & pay for someone to host that domain.  That was relatively easy.  I chose my preferred domain (well my second choice anyway) and then did a bit of research and opted for GoDaddy.com to host my site.  In the end, and to be fair, it wasn’t long until I exported my current content to the new domain, chose a theme, and had the new site up and running.    And that is when I first started to notice that Grand Canyon sized gap between the two offerings. 

The completely free offering for beginners doesn’t offer me enough flexibility and choice and the hosted domain offering has so much flexibility and choice that you need at least a basic level of skill at CSS and/or HTML.  Oh, and I should mention that you’ll need a heckuva lot more time to build that custom blog site, we’re talking days/weeks vs. hours to get it right.   In the end, there doesn’t seem to be middle option.  I’m talking about something that provides me with modularisation and admin simplicity while still giving me more than just a few basic theme options.  I want to concentrate more on my content  and a bit less on skimming the style sheet to find out exactly where the dang image file should be placed without creating a fatal error (I did that at least 19 times!)  

So, where does this leave me? Do I continue to contribute on a casual basis using basic free tools, or do I step up a bit and make a more concerted effort to learn more about CSS and create a professional blog site?  Then there is option 3: I could always pay someone much smater than me to do it for me. I’m looking into option 3 so we’ll see how that goes. 

In the end it comes down to two questions: 1) What am I trying to do here, simply get my point of view out there or 2) am I looking to build the most professional and entertaining site possible?  For the technically literate these positions aren’t mutually exclusive.  However for me, someone who seems to bring out the worst in the machines I so heavily rely on, these questions seem be at the intersection of too much and too little.