I take your point about the free nature of the tools – I guess I read it in light of point 9 which suggested spending quite serious amounts of cash for good hosting.

I’ve nothing against the hosted solutions in themselves, Darnell, and I think it’s great that you can use Blogger with your own domain name now. However I have seen a number of people regret not going down the self-hosting route from the start. Given that it’s relatively inexpensive now to host on a server capable of running PHP and MySQL, and that all the other tools, whilst free, are for checking out a self-hosted web site, I would’ve thought it good to bite the bullet and do it yourself from the word go.

A “webmaster” is, in my opinion, a master of the website you run. It implies you know what you are doing, which means you know about web design, layout, CSS, XHTML, coding, troubleshooting, servers, and all the related stuff that makes a website run efficiently and SEO friendly.

Then why feature a site that is built with FrontPage or Word, or set in 10 year old technology with tables and inline styles, and…I’ve seen a lot of so called webmasters, web page designers, hosting services, and web experts spout their “wisdom” when they don’t walk the walk. They just talk the talk.

Your blog or website is your resume if it is your business. Honestly, as easy as it is to have a WordPress.com free blog, it doesn’t speak well for your webmaster experience, talents, or skills if your site isn’t your resume.

You seem to be forgetting something about both Blogger and WordPress. They both offer to not only easy customization, but both offer cheap hosting plans (and in the case of Blogger, FREE).

That is what I have done for my custom domain, (with Blogger) and I love it quite nicely.