With this post I will talk about setting up your first photo blog. How exciting is that? Before you begin you have a few choices to make. What will your theme be? Will you be doing a daily photo blog or will it be a once in a while blog. Where will you host your blog, on your own site or with one of the community blog sites? Mapping out your goals will help in making a smooth launch of your blog.

There are three distinct types of blogs

• Photo blog on a service such as blogger
• Photo blog on flickror or fotolog
• Photo blog that is self hosted with your own domain name

I’ll talk about each one a little …

Blogger

I have many friends that have blogs hosted on blogger.

Pros

1. Turnkey solution. Easy to use setup wizard where you can be up and running in under five minutes
2. User interface is easy to navigate

Cons

1. I’ve heard people complain of the commenting features
2. A lot of companies/schools block access. Your audience can be affected by this
3. At any point in time blogger can decide they don’t like your content and shut down your site

Flickr

I don’t consider Flickr a true blogging platform. But if you are looking showcase your photo’s and don’t want to write about them much Flickr may be for you. What a lot of people do though is use Flickr to host their photo’s and pull the photo’s from Flickr for blog posts. This gives you a way to reach people either through your blog or through Flickr.

Pros

1. The focus is on hosting pictures
2. Easy to use interface, upload your photos add tags and you are done
3. Large community of like minded people
4. Unlimited storage with pro account which doesn’t cost much.

Cons

1. No email notifications if someone comments on your photo
2. Lack of control of images in places like your start page
3. No batch download

Self hosted blog

Pros

1. Personalized domain name with .com
2. Flexibility to customize your blog to suite your needs
3. No risk for your content. It’s your blog, your rules
4. Unlimited themes and plug-ins

Cons

1. Requires more technical knowledge to set up and run
2. Stopping spam is your responsibility
3. This option requires you to purchase hosting space

This is the option I would go with. With this option you have total control over what you do. With a self hosted blog you have the choice of using different blogging software. The ones I know of off the top of my head are b2evolution, Nucleus, WordPress, Textpattern and Geeklog. That being said, WordPress is the most popular of the bunch and has more options available to it like themes and plugins.

Moving forward with this site my focus will be on WordPress blogs. Come back often or subscribe to my rss feed for future updates.