It is hard to believe but it is a year now that I have been actively blogging. When I started blogging, I did not want to spend the time in setting up a WordPress site. I took all of 5 minutes to setup Blogger and started with my first blog. I added a couple of social icons and did some minimum changes a couple of months later.
As time passed and I continued blogging on a regular basis, I realized that WordPress had certain advantages over Blogger and it prompted me to make the move to WordPress.
Why WordPress
The million dollar question – Why should you consider WordPress? Are the advantages good enough for you to spend time in rebuilding your website? Here are some points I have observed:
- Flexibility and ease of use on WordPress: Clean dashboard and easy to find options on WordPress.
- Great design options through free and paid themes: I could decide how any or all my pages could look based on the themes. Ahh, now a sleek, new look is available at my fingertips.
- Plugins: Large number of plugins available to allow you to extend WordPress functionality.
- Widgets: Allows you to organize, add content and features to the sidebar of different pages and plugins.
- Reduced development effort: Compared to blogger, I am doing negligible development on WordPress (thanks to the awesome readymade functionality available through the community)
- WordPress Editor: It has both a very simple and also a powerful (lots of features) editor. I used to use Windows Live Writer for my blog posts on Blogger but the amount of clutter added to my blog post was tremendous (will tell you more about it in future posts). My favorite: It allows you to copy and paste from your Word document or email.
- SEO Friendly: Performing SEO on WordPress is much easier. There are several well rated plugins to help improve the SEO of the website/blog. Also several WordPress templates/themes incorporate SEO as an integral part.
What about good old blogger? What was awesome about it?
Blogger is an excellent platform if you are starting out with blogging.
- Cost: 100% free, yes you heard it right (don’t we love deals).
- Setup: It is simple and easy to setup (no installing required, no overhead).
- Hosting: You do not need to worry about hosting it as it is hosted by Google.
- Ease of use: You do not have too many options to worry about and can concentrate on writing your blog posts.
- In-built social icons: At the bottom of every post, Blogger embeds a row of social networking icons.
Now that I have finally moved from Blogger to WordPress, I have much more to tell you about my experience with it. In my next blog post, I will write more about hosting, themes, plugins, widgets that I used in WordPress. Are you just starting out blogging or have you been doing it for a bit? What are your thoughts about Blogger and WordPress?