Well hello. I seem to have completed a blogging right of passage as I’ve just migrated from Blogger to WordPress. My old home was looking out of date and old-fashioned. WordPress seems so clean and fresh. So I’ve had a makeover and moved up from high street to low-end designer. But I’m still a world away from couture.
Tip: don’t waste an entire afternoon searching for the ideal free WordPress template only to find you have to pay to host it. Yes WordPress isn’t quite as flexible as I initially thought unless you’re prepared to spend some dosh. There are 85 free templates if you choose free hosting on wordpress.com (or you can pay to host your wordpress.org blog on a separate server).
So I picked this free one but I’m frustrated with it already as there are widgets easily available on Blogger which aren’t available here. I’m going to have to dig around for the HTML to install them myself. But as I’ve just paid $10 to map my domain to WordPress, I’m blimmin well staying put for a bit.
I think I might head to Posterous next. I tested it and Tumblr out during my research and I love the simplicity of both (although Tumblr is rather too basic). Posterous is completely free, very flexible and has some really lovely clean templates. But it seems to be for those with very good HTML knowledge as you install all the extras yourself. I’ll add learning more HTML to my list “of things I really must do very soon“. In the meantime, here’s what I think about Blogger and WordPress in case you’re thinking of switching from one to the other:
Advantages of WordPress
It’s open source so is not owned by a big corporation (Blogger is owned by Google).
To set up the “Subscribe by email” button it’s just a matter of dragging an icon. In Blogger, you have to faff about with code.
Templates are more modern than Blogger (in my opinion).
It’s a button click to get your Avatar to appear alongside your URL. I never worked out how to do this in Blogger.
Blog stats are incorporated in the dashboard=saves time. You have to set these up separately with Blogger eg sitemeter, flagcounter and log in to those accounts to get the stats.
Setting up a poll is incorporated in the dashboard. Very useful and quick way to gather opinions. No such thing in Blogger.
Advantages of Blogger (My old blog is here)
You can monetise it i.e. easily set up Google AdSense (which has earned me the grand total of 15p over 6 months). As far as I know, you can’t do this in WordPress.
In WordPress you have to mark both tags and categories against each post. In Blogger you don’t. It automatically converts tags (called labels in Blogger) into your chosen list of categories if you’ve set it up that way from the outset.
People can follow you publicly through Google friend connect. They can’t on WordPress.
More flexibility in changing font colours and background colours.
Wider choice of widgets/gadgets or whatever you want to call them.
I’m sure there must be plenty more but these are what I’ve noticed. Hopefully I’ll come across even more ‘pros’ for WordPress the more I use it.