Another popular resource for website designs as well as blog designs is the popular Template Monster where themes come with a download fee and are generally better quality if that’s important to you. My personal favorite would have to be Elegant Themes. For a small membership fee of just $19.95 you’ll have access to over 35 professionally designed themes. When I say professionally design I really mean professionally designed. The themes are simply stunning, well coded, well documented, and even come with a Photoshop file so you can make any design changes your heart desires.

For even more themes there’s always Google or the place called Woo Themes featuring a number of different themes that come with a small fee. What most people do is buy or download a theme, and then hire a blog consulting company to personalize that theme matching their specific needs. This method saves them quite a bit of money comparing to hiring a blog design company to design one from scratch.

WordPress was released in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and it is being used by over 200 million websites and blogs wordwide. The company behind WordPress is Automattic. The software is open source – which means it is completely free, and you’re welcome to use it or modify however you want. If something happens to Automattic as a company, and they stop working on WordPress — the large WordPress community will take over, so you don’t have to worry about the longevity of the application and its existence 5 years from now. WordPress is easy to use, it’s lightweight, it is packed with some of the most amazing features you could find in a blog platform. There are over 7,500 free plugins that extend the functionality of WordPress, and over 1,100 themes (designs).

Movable Type was released in 2001 by the company called Six Apart. It is not an open source project like WordPress (although they do have an open source version, it’s not as feature-rich as the paid version). A couple of years ago Movable Type was the most recommended blog platform, and the platform of choice by many businesses and corporations. However, since Movable Type is not free for business-use, I’ve seen companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on licensing alone, and some go with WordPress for that reason alone. In other words licensing can be the deal breaker when choosing between Movable Type and WordPress. There are not as many plugins and themes comparing to WordPress. Software updates don’t come out as often, and many claim that it feels bloated and slow when working with or publishing your blog.

During the past 2 years I’ve seen a huge growth of WordPress (see chart below), many large corporations like TIME, Inc. switched from Movable Type to WordPress — which could either be because of the on-going licensing fees and the economy we are in, or the growing list of WordPress features. We’ve also seen the changes at Movable Type where they let go of some of their key people, then VP Anil Dash leaving the company a couple of months ago, and some other bitter things that I’m not going to discuss in this post.

Earlier in 2009 we converted our company site from Movable Type to WordPress, and helped many of our clients make the switch as well. As you might have guessed, our personal preference and recommendation is WordPress, however I will say it again — it all comes down to your specific needs, budget, and the situation you are in. If you are not sure on the platform you should be using — just shoot us an email and we’ll make a recommendation based on your scenario.

We’re excited to announce a new name in blog consulting — namely, BlogConsulting.com. We’re adopting the new name to better reflect who we are: your partner of choice for understanding how to get the most out of your blog.

What does this mean for you? It doesn’t change the way we do business, or what you can expect from us. You can still access our site at FirmDot.com, in addition to BlogConsulting.com. Our invoices and other communications now read BlogConsulting.com, but you can continue to pay us the same way you always have. We’re working on a new Web site to introduce the name, along with a suite of new services to better serve our customers, and we’ll notify you when it is available.

We appreciate your business, and we look forward to providing you with even better service as BlogConsulting.com.

Next day I’m flying to Los Angeles to check on our new data center, and to make sure things are running smooth.