Blogger vs Wordpress?

Blog it or Press it?


I am sure bloggers of the world would have gone through this critical question before embarking on their journey into the blogosphere. It is of vital importance too and spending some time pondering over it will make your blogging experience that much more pleasant and comfortable.

Customization: I think, a blog should reflect who you are; Creating a look that defines me and creating layout that i want will be my first priority. Both Wordpress and Blogger do a fundo job of helping you come up with "your" kind of atmosphere. Both Wordpress and Blogger gives you myriad themes you can choose from and you can still customize on top of that. There are also tons of free themes available for both Wordpress and Blogger available on the net. So, full marks to both Wordpress and Blogger for letting us setup a blog-shop fast and easy and settling us into a cozy, comfy zone easier. Though, i find Blogger more fun to write on as it allows much more color on the text.

Traffic and SEO: Both Wordpress and Blogger pull in traffic by themselves... Once you are registered and start to pour your thoughts out, traffic is routed to your blog by the power of the hosting sites themselves. Their excellent SEO, tag/labels, pretty much does a lot of the initial traffic for you.(Of course, your blog has to have excellent content to grow more!)
But, once your blog grows, you would want to keep up with the traffic, want to know where your fan base is from, which pages gets you more love, etc. Now, the leading traffic analyzing site is Google Analytics- which is free! And recently Google Analytics announced its new Real-time Analytics- which basically means that you can see which page your visitors who are currently on-line are on, where they are from, how much time they have spent on your blog and more. All this for free and the damper is that Wordpress does not allow the blogs hosted by it to be linked by Google Analytics. Which means, you dont get access to one of the best add-ons to your blog! It really is a killer for me. I have to rely on other tracking sites (there are alot of free ones available...) which sadly, cant come even close to Google Analytics. With blogger, it is just a cut and paste of code away from GA.

Organizing the content: An important aspect of blogging is a way to categorize and group up the content in your blog. Thereby, making it easier for people to be able to see it at a later date, look up for yourself and easier to link up the previous blogs to the newest ones (which is also a great SEO strategy, BTW) Blogger comes up with labels which seems so amateurish when compared to the categories and tags of Wordpress. Wordpress zips past Blogger on this one!

Widgets: Adding widgets is great fun and makes your blog more attractive, interesting, interactive and informative. Wordpress does not support Java script, Which means that interactive or dynamic widgets are not supported by Wordpress. While a lot of sites do support wordpress and write Wordpress-friendly non-JavaScript code, it cannot be expected all the time... Blogger steps up one notch here.

Safety: The main reason Wordpress doesnt support JavaScript is because it JavaScript could potentially be a threat to the safety of the site. I am sure this is super for a newbie blogger or a student blogger who definitely needs to be careful about the big bad world out there...

As a blogger, Content is King and no matter what the platform is, the words pouring from you makes it unique and attractive to the reader. And Blogger and Wordpress do a great job of displaying your blog out there for the viewers. If you ask me, Wordpress could just be perfect for a novice; It is easy, clean and straightforward. Blogger could just be for those who want to experiment a little and add a dash of color...

Anyways, on both platforms, under the settings tab, you can export and import blogs quite easily, thereby making things quite easy to erase a mistake :)