January 8th, 2012
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| My WordPress blog (hyperbole alert :P) |
My blog’s been running for three months now, but the idea of blogging had been actually luring me since early in the summer. Naturally, I set up to find the blogging platform that’d suit me better, and the choice was between Blogger and WordPress. Wanting to try both, I signed up with an account for each and started experimenting with the design of what was still at the time a nascent, immature idea. Also at the time, Blogger was still in its stagnant neglected form, and it wasn’t until later in the summer that Google finally gave it an overhaul and made it the great platform that it is today. Before giving my reasons for favoring Blogger (you could already tell, right? :P) though, I’ll start with a simple tip about managing a blog (regardless of where it’s hosted).
I usually behave on the internet like those Google bots (aka crawlers), and whenever I stumble upon an interesting blog, I make sure to read many posts/articles, and to check who writes it (If you have a blog that I happened to find, I’m the one responsible for those 30 something hits in 10 mins :P And you’re welcome :D ).
One thing I found on many blogs, and an embarrassing thing it is, is pages (for example the “About Me” page) that still showed “Lorem ipsum” text (standard text that has no meaning that you insert just to see how your content would look like in a certain design, a placeholder) instead of any actual info. Now I admit that some of these pages weren’t meant to be seen (I just change the url to blogname.com/about; you’d be surprised with what you could find), but I actually visited a blog where an “About” link was prominently displayed on the homepage, and once I clicked on it I got to a page full of Ipsums. So if you're a blogger, you would want to be careful when importing a template, and take the time to check that no unwanted pages are published, even if no links are displayed.
With that out of the way, I listed below what made me go with Blogger, and some WordPress pros for the sake of fairness.
Blogger Pros:
- If you’re comfortable with HTML and CSS, you’ll definitely wanna go with Blogger since it allows you to shape your blog to your heart’s will, and unlike WordPress, that’d be for free (a free WordPress account would allow you very limited customizations, and you’d be restricted in functionality with the pre-existing widgets, though there’s admittedly plenty of them).
- Google has been working lately on integrating all of its services together, and this will likely continue in the future. Few examples are linking your blog with your Google+ profile (and you get to see your image next to your posts in search results :P), and the Google apps services (most importantly Gmail for your blog) you get if you opt for your own domain.
- Blogger is also cheaper in general (in cost, not quality) than WordPress, for example registering your own domain (yourblogname.com instead of yourblogname.blogspot.com) with Blogger costs $10/yr, while it costs around $19 with WordPress.
- Even if you’re afraid of getting your hands dirty with HTML, there’s a flood (literally) of free templates available online, or you could simply set your blog to display Blogger’s new stylish “Dynamic Views”.
WordPress Pros:
- Your blog will admittedly simply work out of the box, so if you’re ok with the limited templates (or don’t mind shedding some money), you’ll be churning out posts in no time :P
- WordPress’ “Freshly Pressed” service is highly acclaimed, it selects material (provided they’re interesting enough) and displays them on WordPress.com’s front page, giving your blog great exposure (new hits could reach thousands in a very short time).