I’ve been blogging, in various shapes and forms pretty much since 2004, when I was at university, and sharing the woes of my love life – or, should I say my serious lack of…! Over the past eight years, blogging has changed immensely. Blogging today is less about sharing your personal diaries, and more about sharing opinions and getting your voice heard.
For me, it has been great to see blogging grow and thrive into the crazy world that it is today. I’ve seen – and used – various forms of blogging platforms that have attempted to crack the market with varying success, many of which have clung on for dear life before eventually being kicked into the abyss either by lack of users, or when they are bought out by the Big Dogs.
However, two platforms have always been popular choices, and are definitely the two most prominent choices amongst bloggers today. They are of course Blogger and WordPress.
Personally, I’m always torn between the two. When I started my beauty blog in 2010, I actually started out using WordPress, because I couldn’t get my head around Blogger. Eventually, I moved over there because it was where all of the other Beauty Bloggers appeared to be. It took me a long time to get used to Blogger, and for a long time I had my gripes with it. In fact, to this day, I find Blogger to be glitchy and often annoying.
I currently have two blogs over there, my beauty blog: Barefoot Girl and my entertainment blog: Entertained.
However, I recently chose to move my writing blog (which you are reading right now) over here to WordPress. So, as you can tell, I have a big conflict of interests over which I consider to be the best, because they both have their pros and their cons.
Now, it’s important to point out, that when I talk about WordPress, I’m not talking about wordpress.org which is paid for. I’m concentrating on the free alternative.
User-Friendly.
Despite my early misgivings, when you get used to it, Blogger is an absolute doddle to use, and I actually find it more user-friendly than WordPress. It’s really easy to edit templates, and if you know a little basic HTML it’s easy to use other independently-made templates, to create a blog that is personal to you and what your blog is about, which leads us to my next point.
Personal.
With Blogger, you are not confined to using the templates that are offer to you, as they allow you do use your own templates if you wish, or ones that you have downloaded from elsewhere. This is great for making blog personal, especially if you run a business and can afford to pay someone to create a template that matches your company in terms of logos etc, and even your website in terms of design. This makes it easier to bring websites and blogs together.
Advertising.
In case you didn’t know, Blogger is owned by Google, making it super easy to use your blog for advertising using Google AdSense. However, until you’re getting a lot of hits, it’s unlikely that you’ll make much money this way.
Professional.
There is something so much sleeker about WordPress’s templates, which makes them look more professional. For a business, this is incredibly important, however if you’re running a personal blog, it’s probably not what you’d be looking for. However, unless you are willing to pay, you are limited to only using the templates on offer. Most templates are pretty customisable, meaning that you can alter the backgrounds and headers to how you want them, but for some people there still isn’t enough control.
SEO.
WordPress is perfect for Search Engine Optimisation, and I certainly get a lot more feedback from blogs that I run through it. I’m more likely to get “likes” and comments when I post on WordPress, than I am with Blogger. I don’t know if people on WordPress are just more “chatty“, because I do still get a fair amount of readers to Blogger.
The image uploader is also better designed for optimising your images to draw in more people.
Opinion:
These days, I’m finding myself leaning more towards WordPress, purely because it is much less “glitchy” than Blogger. However, I do still love the ease at which you can make changes to blogs on Blogger, and I enjoy the fact that I’ve learnt a bit of HTML on my blogging journey, which is always helpful.