I’m a huge fan of Tumblr, not only for blogging but also their flexibility and simplicity on creating your blogs, websites.
There are so many choices out there to create a website or blog. Wordpress is the most popular and common, many other good services like Webflow, Tilda, Squarespace, Simplice,… with beautiful templates.
Wordpress is too complicated for me. Some people (engineers) say it’s very easy, but not for me. How to set up the project, how to run it on local to work with, how to upload to a host to go live? and many other questions. Come on man, I’m a designer who knows only CSS and HTML.
How about other services? They are great: beautiful templates, easy to use, no code required to create a blog or website. But the most important thing is money, we have to pay a monthly fee.
I don’t want to pay money for personal and fun stuff. Not for now. Honestly, I used to use Tilda to create my first portfolio. It’s a beautiful website, but I hate the footer with Tilda logo! We couldn’t remove it with a free package.
But from the time I found what we can do with Tumblr, I don’t care about those services anymore.
Here are 5 reasons why I fall in love with Tumblr on creating websites and blogging.
1. It’s free
You can create any blog as you want, a lot of free themes that we can install with one click. Changing a theme is easy like changing clothes. And you can post as many articles, many photos as you want without worries about the bandwidth or host fee. Everyone loves anything that’s free.
2. Custom HTML and CSS
This is one of the main reasons why I chose Tumblr. If you know the basic HTML and CSS, you will love it too. I don’t like the default style of free Tumblr theme, and I always want to change it. I customized the whole UI fo this blog, this is the original theme. Do you believe that? I kept all the skeleton of a Tumblr blog structure and changed only the CSS and HTML.
You can also remove all the code and insert your HTML to create your landing page. I created many landing pages when applying for a job, like 6 reasons for Carousell should hire me, or my portfolio
3. Custom your domain
By default, you will have your website but followed by .tumblr.com. It’s not a beautiful URL. For example myblog.tumblr.com. With Tumblr, you can change to your dream domain. But first, you have to buy your domain, Godaddy is a popular one, then you can replace Tumblr domain with that domain. Now you have a completed website with your beautiful domain, mine is trongnguye.co
If you use other services like Tilda, Simplice,… you have to pay a monthly fee to a custom domain. It’s the biggest barrier for me to use them.
4. Create many blogs and websites as you want
With a free account, you can create a dozen or even a hundred website.
I owned many blogs, most of them are just for fun. For some blogs, I created them, then removed their base code and put my HTML and CSS to make custom websites. It doesn’t have a be only a blog.
5. Download all posts to your machine
One day, if you don’t want to use Tumblr anymore or you want to blog switch to another platform like Wordpress, what would you do? You can download all the old posts on Tumblr, save it on your computer or upload them to your new blog.
This is a very small feature but I can feel how well they treat their users, their community.
By adding this feature, they want to say “If you don’t like Tumblr, you can use other websites, and we will help to do it.”
How humble and generous Tumblr is! It reminds me of the awesome Basecamp app.
This morning I got an email from Tumblr, that they were acquired by Automatic Inc, the company behind Wordpress, wooCommerce. I don’t like any news relates to acquisition. With me, it means the owner doesn’t passionate about their product anymore. But Automatic is better for Tumblr than Verizon or Yahoo!
I have a belief that Tumblr will be great again.
P/S: But please don’t remove those 5 cool features.
