

Our article on how to make a website will help get you started with an option like this, but you'll also need to acquaint yourself with WordPress's extensive documentation (our guide to the best WordPress tutorials can help). Plus, any ads that appear on your blog will be ones that you've chosen to put there. However, if you take the time to get to grips with it, you'll be rewarded with an unprecedented degree of control over your site. Also, note that you'll still need to pay for web hosting and a domain name to get your blog online. This isn't, then, the best choice of free blogging platform if you want to build a blog in a day. When we reviewed it, we found that 's software takes some time to understand, and getting the results you want may require learning at least some web design skills. Considering this is a self-hosted platform with no dedicated customer support, that may be a step too far for some. The pay-off is that it takes a bit more work to learn the system. This open-source site-building software is totally free to use, and we've found that what you can do with it is basically unlimited. We think the best free blogging platform for that fine level of control is (not to be confused with – the next on our list). As an artist or designer, you're probably used to having more control over your work. With the options mentioned so far, you only get limited control over how your blog posts look. See our full Substack review for more details. We particularly liked the version history feature, which lets you easily access past versions of your post, and the fact that the lightweight interface kept working, even during periods of low mobile connectivity. When we used Substack to set up a newsletter/blog for our review, we found it to be one of the easiest interfaces we'd ever used. Only once you start charging people for subscriptions will Substack take a cut. Plus, Substack is free as long as you make your posts/emails free for everyone to read. However, you will get a basic CMS (content management system) with text formatting tools and the ability to embed images, video and other web content. Since Substack's main focus is on emails, its blog features are extremely limited. We should clarify that if you want a unique looking blog, this isn't the best choice.

So it effectively works as a free blogging platform too. Newsletters are Substack's main focus, but you also get a web page to share all your past newsletters in one place. We discovered that with Substack you can actually kill two birds with one stone. For many, this is an alternative to blogging. More and more artists and designers are promoting themselves with email newsletters.
