Here's a great article that covers the in's and out's of where you can go to get a free blog. All artists should have a blog...even if you only post once a week or once a month! It's a great way for the public to get to know you and see your art.
The explosion of social networking and micro-blogging has lead to a corresponding explosion in the popularity of blogs and article writing. If you're looking for a free provider to host your blog, you probably want to choose one that you can stick with in the long-term.
Here are five popular services that offer free blogging potential, and some reasons why you might want to choose them as the host for your journal, website or photo blog.
1. Google Sites
You may be quite familiar with Google Docs, but have you tried Google Sites? Sites is a lesser-known addition to the Google Apps family that allows you to pull in data from your Google Docs and some Google Gadgets. You can then sit other elements around it, such as blog posts, RSS feeds, forms and static pages. Layouts are reasonably fixed, though, so if you need to adapt the appearance of your website and tinker with code, you're probably best off looking elsewhere.
Sites aren't the most intuitive service, and many writers still choose to use Google's long-standing platform, Blogger. Blogger is undoubtedly more suited to 'pure' blogging, but anyone who uses Google Docs extensively may find Sites offers them the flexibility they need as they outgrow more basic blogging solutions. It's also great for users to work extensively in the cloud through Google Apps.
2. WordPress.com
WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most popular tool on the web. It comes in two flavours: WordPress.com is a hosted blog site which gives you limited control over your posts, whereas WordPress.org provides you with the necessary tools to install the same software on your own server. If you head to WordPress.org and download the files needed to set up WordPress on your own server, you'll be able to pick up some basic programming knowledge as you tinker with the code, making it a good choice if you're learning PHP.
But even just being familiar with WordPress is useful to know if you plan to get into blogging on a freelance basis. It's so widely used for blogging now that it has almost become a standard, and a huge amount of regular article-writing work is based around some knowledge of the WordPress interface. Having said that, if you just want somewhere to post pictures or a journal, you may find WordPress is overkill for your needs. And if you're planning to install it yourself, you'll need to spend a little time setting it up before you begin.
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