by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: November 20, 2009

There are a number of sites for publishing articles, multimedia presentations, and blog pages that look like high quality magazines. There are also benefits and drawbacks to various sites, depending on the goals of the writer.

The first and most important consideration for serious writers is in the agreement that the site requires while registering. Printing it out and reading it carefully will make a writer more aware of publishing rights that the site is claiming. Some sites acquire all of the usage rights to a person's published content, and most writers are unaware of this until a member of the site posts a warning. Others, like Google Blogger, acquire no rights at all. This is critical when writers are deciding whether to get their work off to the US Copyright office before they publish it, or whether they just want to publish and gain an audience.

Some bloggers are not technophiles at all. They want to publish straight text, with readable fonts and no extra bells and whistles. The best sites, however, allow writing to a word processing document software in the home computer, then copying and pasting with all of the formats intact. The best sites allow insertion of photos, active links, and videos, and allow advanced page editing with ease for such effects as word wrap, which give a professional, magazine like layout. The HTML editors allow colorized text, framed boxed inserts, and other advanced options.

Other sites, such as WordPress and Google Blogger, allow all of the fancy word processing formats, plus photos, videos, and even more advanced fee based page editing software. The basic, free of charge editing is fantastic, allowing either an HTML or visual text entry format. The individual's blog page itself, can be customized from a wide array of beautiful templates where all of the complex web page code is already written, or as web page that is designed from scratch with the more advanced fee based web design software.

Both WordPress and Google Blogger give a writer the benefits of their own personal website without the hassle of having to be a web developer. There are also ways to control comments, include ads and get a little ad revenue at Blogger, review the blog statistics and views, and to customize tags and other search engine optimizing tools.

Whether a blogger uses WordPress, Blogger or another site for publishing content, there are also marketing sites that allow more exposure of the blog to wider audiences through Redd, Diggit, and Blogpress. These are blog sharing sites that direct viewers to your content through those services.

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