Blogger vs. WordPress: Pros and Cons

Kyle — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:46:45 +0000

Blogspot and WordPress.org are two blogging platforms that dominates the blogosphere today. If you’re one of the people who wants to venture in the blogging industry, chances are you’ll be using any of these two. If you’re really into serious blogging, a good understanding of the two platforms is important to help you decide what platform fits you the most.

If there are three words I’ll choose in describing what blogger(blogspot) platform is, that would be “built for beginners”. Blogger aka Blogspot is the best choice if you are completely new to blogging. That is because blogger is very easy to use and you can easily familiarize the interface in approximately 1 day. If you’ll be using wordpress for the first time, you’ll be lost with some of the functionalities. Although wordpress has a very easy learning curve, blogger still beats wordpress in terms of user-friendliness. Blogspot community are helpful too, and you can easily find useful resources if you have some ideas on what blogspot gigs you want to implement in your blog. The choice of themes is not a problem anymore, there are available sites in which you can download beautiful themes for free. Blogspot blogs are also widgetized and you can simply alter the components of your blog in a drag and drop manner. But what’s really good about blogspot is that you have unlimited space and bandwith that you can use all for free. You can also mask the default blogspot adresss by buying your own domain name.

Beyond this user-friendliness and ease of use blogspot blogs still lack finesse compared to wordpress. You cannot make custom pages and you have too much code interactions if you want to do something extraordinary with your blog. That means the level of customization has it’s limit. Blogspot blogs do not comply to W3C rules too, I’ve never seen a fully developed blog that complies to W3C standards. There’s too much clutter in the code and scaling your blogger blog is next to impossible. And one thing I hate about blogspot is the editor, even though Google have updated the old editor the new one is still not that good compared to wordpress.

If “Built for beginners” is the best way to describe blogger then WordPress is “Meant for hardcore bloggers”. I’ve been to blogger platform before and migrated to WordPress and I’m happy that I did. At first I was at lost in using the WordPress interface since I’m used to the old blogspot way. But in a matter of days (one and a half), It seems that I totally mastered it. Flexibility and versatility is one thing I love about WordPress, you can do so much customizations with it with the help of plugins. You can just do any thing you’ve imagined by just using plugins. In the long, running a wordpress blog is very easy to maintain. The choice of themes are to the max, at the time of this writing there’s 1000+ themes available in wordpress site and there’s so much more aside from the main site. If you really value professionalism then wordpress is the right choice for you.

Well you just have to pay a little to your self-hosted wordpress blog to run. From what I know the most cheap hosting siteoffers unlimited space and bandwith at a cost of $4($3.95) per month. If you’re in great luck you can look for some hosting promotions that could give you big discount. I’ve posted an article here in which I stumbled a $10 value of webhosting offering unlimited space and bandwith for a year of hosting. WordPress.com offers unlimited space and bandwitdh but the functionality is very limited if you’ll compare it to a self-hosted one. The only one thing that bothers me is that why’s wordpress do not have the CAPTCHA functionality to their commenting system. Although Akismet really works for SPAM protection It’s still uncomfortable in my part without a built in CAPTCHA functionality.

6 things that you should do when you make a new blogger blog.

Kyle — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:41:37 +0000

1. Choose a nice template that is SEO friendly and appropriate for your niche. Most bloggers took a long time deciding what template to use. If you are going to ask me I’ll pick for the minimalist design since it’s very SEO friendly with less clutter to their codes. Greatly designed themes are not that SEO optimized with full of images that makes the page load time very slow.What we want to achieve is a blog with great performance and good looking. Minimalist design is by far the best template that you can use in your blog. Although minimalist design is stuck with the basic colors you can do some serious customizations that would make your blog look good.

2. Display a visible link with your RSS feed in your home page. You can also apply for a feedburner account in which you can use the link for your RSS feed. Readers of your blog which is interested in your content looks for RSS feed in which they can subscribe. If they’re the lazy readers they would rarely visit your site and would read your content to their favorite RSS aggregators.

3. Monetize your blog right away. Some people believe that displaying ads to a newly made blog is a bad practice. In my case there’s nothing wrong with that. People don’t bother those ads after all! what they want is content and not the ads.I’ll recommend using adsense if you’ll be monetizing your blog, adding it to blogger blogs is relatively easy.Always remember that your ads should not be an eyesore to the reader. Masks the appearance of your ads in such a way that it looks like a part of the content. Who knows, you could get lots of money in your week old blog.

4. Add Title tag hack to your blog. Blogger blogs display their pages in search engines in an odd way. Odd way means not SEO friendly, They follow the format of “BLOGTITLE : POST TITLE” and that is not good when users search for information. You can use this link to for the title tag hack customization. If you are thinking of adding meta keywords and meta description tags to your posts I will discourage you of doing that. It will bloat your code in some ay if your post count reached 500. I’ve been there before so trust me with this.

5.Register to Google Analytics and Webmasters tools. This is very self explanatory, you’ll be needing google analytics in tracking your web traffic and Webmasters tools for sitemap addition and tracking for some indexing problems. Sitemeter is a good choice too since it can detect web traffic real time.

6. Change the commenting system of your blog. The default for blogger blogs is that only people with Google i.d. can comment to your post. Change the settings so all people can comment to your post, just make sure that captcha validation will not be disabled or else you’ll be having problems with spam. You can also apply for Disquss commenting system which is very good in managing comments. Disquss commenting system also looks good to blogspot blog making it more proffessional looking. The only downside of this one is that you’ll have another account for comment monitoring which is a hassle in my part.

Techno Kyle » blogspot

Blogger vs. WordPress: Pros and Cons

6 things that you should do when you make a new blogger blog.