What is a good site to use to begin a blog?

Blogger which is probably one of the most popular blogging sites, the next being Wordpress. Both are pretty nice, imo.

@chels great, but do all these have to look pretty uniform or are they easy to customize?

@rskaletz Pretty easy to customize! Wordpress has tons of themes that you can choose from and mess around with. Blogger has some too, but I don’t think as many.

For customization, I would not recommend using Wordpress.com, since you’re rather limited in adding any custom CSS unless you pay for it. You’re essentially limited to installing themes and (if the themes are of decent quality) fiddling around with options that the thememaker has prebuilt for you. If you’re fine with picking and choosing themes, though, this may be a good choice for you.

Quite a few people use Blogspot, which seems fairly customizable…I’ll find some examples of different Blogspot blogs if you want to see what people tend to do with it. Tons of the blogs I read use either Blogspot (hosted) or they install their own version of Wordpress instead of using the hosted one. Installing Wordpress onto your own server requires quite a bit of technical know-how, but if that’s not a problem, I would argue this is the best option for ultimate customizability.

My personal favourite blogging service would be Tumblr, because it’s dead easy to post things, and they have a ton of helpful information on the website on creating your own custom themes. But there are some limitations (notably the lack of a built-in commenting system; you’ll have to use a third-party service like Disqus or IntenseDebate).

Sidenote: Blogspot & Blogger are the same thing! Just so you don’t get confused.

And @kyanblue oh snap. I didn’t even think about tumblr, and I have one that I use daily. I suppose I just don’t really associate it with blogging, since I don’t really use it to blog.

@kyanblue what about blogger.com? Easy to customize/add pics?

Tumblr.com ! Its the best by far, with on click you can blog music, pictures, text, links, videos! its awesome. would never recommend anything else.

Well, Tumblr is not quite a blog in the traditional sense; I think of mine as a snagfile to post quotes and great photography and miscellaneous quips from everyday life, since the way Tumblr is set up it’s inclined towards fleeting thoughts as opposed to longer, content-heavy articles. This is great for me when I don’t have the patience for a full-length blog post.

This can be a good or bad thing.

@rskaletz It should be relatively easy to customize nearly anything; if I remember correctly they let you delve into the HTML code, so if you’re comfortable with that you could easily add pictures and change around your header image, like you said, and also change layout, fonts, color, et cetera…add things like a ‘Read More’ link or a ‘Related Posts’ type of thing…I’m assuming you have a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS for this?

You might like to check out an ebook on customizing Blogger templates if you want some in-depth information on what can be done. The site has some other helpful information about what you can do.

Also with what @kyanblue said about diving into HTML. With tumblr, the nice thing about that is you don’t really have to know anything about HTML to actually add things. I’m pretty much a stranger to HTML but just searching for specific codes and things that I know I want on my page was really easy.

I use Multiply and MyBlogLog. Multiply is easiest to customize.

I like Tumblr. Dead simple, but not the most customizable. I’ve never liked Wordpress. Every time I started using it I ditched it pretty darn quick.

Blogger is easy to customise. Tumblr and wordpress less so (unless you are self-installing wordpress).

Blogger, multiply and myspace are the 3 first sites I’ve ever use in blogging.

I would suggest using tumblr if you are interested in posting much and less customization. In tumblr posts look good and nice. You can just post on the go. Hope this helps you.