Blogger vs Wordpress
Debates have always raged about which platform is better; Blogger, or Wordpress. The answer really depends where you go, but within my online hangouts Wordpress is King. The simplest way of looking at the two is:
Of course this is a very basic view, some of the reasons why Wordpress is better in my opinion are:
However, this post isn’t really about evaluating which is better, it’s more to display my shock at Blogger’s continued progress. After recently reading several articles about people shifting from Blogger to Wordpress I naturally assumed that Wordpress would be doing to Blogger what Facebook is doing to Myspace - that is to say catching it up rapidly in terms of popularity. The Alexa Chart above says differently… I can understand that Blogger may seem like the safe and easy option being backed by Google after all, but people need to wake up and educate themselves about proper blogging. It’s not good enough for the web-savvy community to know which is better, this is a failure on Wordpress’ part. In my opinion Wordpress need to work very hard to make their blogging cms easier for your average user. The average person won’t want to pay someone else to fix up their blog, they will want it up and running within minutes. Whilst I hate to admit this, it seems like Blogger does have the upper hand in this respect. Just looking at the two website’s homepages will tell you which looks more ‘fun’ and ‘user-friendly’. That isn’t to say that I like Blogger’s homepage, in fact quite the opposite. But I hate reality television - and look how well that’s doing.
I would love to know of any Blogger users that might be reading this, but I can’t imagine that there will be many. Would anyone support the simplifying of Wordpress, or would they see this as ‘dumbing down’?
Hey Tom. I started on Blogger and later moved an independent WordPress blog. I agree with you that WordPress is the premiere blogging software. I would never go back.
But, having said that, it is important to clarify that in the comparison you are speaking of WordPress.com (the free blogging service) and not about blogs using the open source software on their own domain. My experience with both free services is that WordPress.com is not really more difficult to use. On January 25th, I posted about an experiment I did with both services and it took less than 12 minutes to get a blog started with both Blogger and WordPress.com.
I would agree that using the open source WordPress on your own domain is more difficult. But that’s usually not a problem for those of us that want the flexibility that come with an independent blog.
Thanks for the comment Jim, I should have made that distinction clear. I was partly talking about Blogger being branded as simpler though, many people (such as myself) seem to be of the opinion that it is.
The major drawback Wordpress.com has for many people, is that monetization is forbidden. And most people enjoy to see their blogs paying off, at least for a cup of coffee, if not more.
It’s not forbidden if you are paying for their services. I guess it’s only forbidden in order to stop spammy websites, but I’m not sure if this is a good policy to have…
I started with Blogger, tried Movable Type, later WordPress and I am back at Blogger. I find it easier to use which leaves me time to write and play with it rather than try to make things work. I found most of the templates would not work when I loaded them, this was really aggravating. I tried doing my own for awhile. I came back to Blogger and I stayed because I can customize it quite easily and change background, headers and such very easily, just a minor change to the code. I don’t see how anyone could prefer WordPress. I found it clunky and full of bugs. Also, I rarely get any spam comments on Blogger while I had packs of them with WP.
Blogger is easier I think, but I do find Wordpress more flexible if you get to know it well. As for spam comments I do receive quite a few, but a spam filter sorts them out easily.
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