Posterous

Posterous is a free blogging platform that simplifies the process of designing and maintaining a blog. It's ideal for casual users, especially those who intend to update their blogs frequently from mobile devices with concise text or reasonably sized image and audio files.

You can look through a gallery of themes and preview them skinned over your blog before committing to the change. Most of the browsing and previewing takes place in one window, minimizing the time it takes to choose a new style. More advanced web creators can further customize the code used in the themes, or write their own.

The interface for managing all blog posts is very clear and easy to read.

In testing multiple online blogging platforms, I found Posterous to provide some of the clearest explanations and walk-throughs for registering a unique domain name (meaning removing "posterous" from your blog's URL). The price (starting at $12.99 per year) is front and center where it should be, as are the other details of what's included. Posterous also offers this service directly whereas with some other blogging platforms, it's up to you to register the domain name elsewhere and interconnect all the pieces yourself. I'd much rather have one site handle all these aspects, so long as it's for a fair price.

Autoposting means Posterous will take your blog content and automatically post it to other sites as well (but not vice versa). For example, if you enable Twitter in the Autopost area, everytime you write a new blog post, the first few dozen characters of text will become a tweet from your Twitter account. If you connect Flickr, every image that you import to Posterous will also be sent and saved to your Flickr account. Autoposting is an excellent tool for bloggers and web site owners because it prompts them toward best practices of letting readers and followers know when new content is available.

Posterous lets you create individual pages, which are different than posts. Pages are more like content that you want readers to be able to find all the time, rather than topical blog entries. An example of a page might be "About Me" and "Contact."

The gallery of themes you can use to skin your blog isn't always easy to see, although you can view them and try them on without leaving the page.

The tools Posterous gives you to customize an existing theme without having to learn how to write code are very good. You can select a new color using a color picker, and just as when you're picking a theme, you never have to leave the screen to alter the theme.