You have decided on your topic, your target audience, and the frequency you will post, but what platform should you use to blog and reach the world with your words? Wordpress, Movable Type, Symphony or Textpattern? There are so many options, but which is the right one?

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Personally I use WordPress, and wouldn’t go with any other. Here are a few reasons why you should use WordPress when starting your blog.

Plugins

If you want to do something interesting such as display your blog stats, display recent comments, put up a contact form, or anything else that springs to mind, the WordPress community it littered with thousands of handy plugins that can do simple tasks, up to downright amazing things to enhance your blog.

Theme Library

As the most used blogging system in the world you would expect WordPress to have the most themes available, and your right. There are thousands of free open source themes up for download all over the internet. WordPress is also very easy to develop for - it doesn’t take much more than basic HTML and CSS knowledge to customize a theme to your liking.

User Community

The user community using, and based around WordPress is amazing. If you need help with your install, a simple Google search should give you an answer, if not, there are dozens of online forums full of helpful people to fix your issue.

The user community is constantly helping others, developing new themes and plug-ins, and providing the WordPress developers with many feature requests to improve it’s build - which in the long run works out better for you as WordPress wil be more stable, and more packed with features than any other piece of blogging software.

Things to get after the install

After you install WordPress, I recommend you do a few things. The first thing is enable permalinks so your URL’s look tidier. Instead of ending with something such as “archives/741″ - you will get “2007/01/01/example-post/”.

The second thing you should do it beautify your WordPress back-end, the admin area by installing WP Tiger Administration v3.0 made by Steve Smith of Ordered List.

After you have done all of this, you can move on and get stuck into the next stage which we will cover in the next installment - picking a theme and plug-ins.