Blogger and Wordpress are both useful blogging platforms, and each has their fans. I happen to use both of them and thought I'd briefly go through what I perceive to be some of the pros and cons of each in order to work out which is best.

The Case For Blogger
Blogger is a simple to use blogging system from Google. It's free to use and allows someone to very quickly get a blog up and running, either under the blogspot.com domain or under a custom domain name of their own choosing. I prefer to publish by FTP to my own website. You login to the Blogger website and publish posts, which generate static HTML files. Because it generates HTML files, you can publish these to any web server to which you have access by FTP.

The Case Against Blogger
There's no technical reason for it, but Blogger blogs often don't look as good as Wordpress blogs. There are a variety of templates available, but I genuinely haven't seen many with a "wow" factor. The method of commenting on a Blogger blog isn't great either. To add a comment requires you to be taken off the blog site and to a blogger hosted page. This gives a slightly fractured feel to the user experience when adding a comment. Making a change to a large blog, or publishing a new post can be really slow because each static page needs to be recreated (if you are using FTP publishing).

The Case For Wordpress
Wordpress is really nice to use with some features - it actually makes blogging a pleasure. A wide variety of attractive themes is available, and switching between them is a doddle. There's loads of useful plugins available that extend the functionality of Wordpress.

Another thing I like Wordpress is that I can write posts in advance that don't show up until on or after the timestamp that I give them. I'm currently writing a blog about a TV show airing on BBC one. I've already seen all episodes in advance, and can write blog posts recapping episodes, and timestamp them so that the posts will automatically show up after the show has been aired.

Wordpress allows you to take control of the URL structure and create SEO friendly pages. The ability to create "pages" as well as "posts" gives Wordpress makes it feel more like a CMS than just a blog.

The Case Against Wordpress
Wordpress often needs updating, as new versions come out or security risks are discovered. Because it's run from a database, if there's any problems with the server hosting the database, the whole blog goes down. Whilst you can run mySQL and Wordpress on Windows web hosting, you can only get the benefit of SEO-friendly URLs by using mod-rewrite, which is available on Apache web server which is usually part of a LAMP hosting environment. Setting up Wordpress is a bit more of a technical challenge than Blogger, although some hosts do offer a "one click" installation.

In summing up, both Blogger and Wordpress are useful tools which will allow anyone to get a decent looking site up and running and allow them to concentrate on content. My own personal opinion is that if I am creating a new site which is a dedicated blog, I will plump for Wordpress. If I am adding a blog as a section to an existing site, and probably just using it as a means to regularly add content, I tend to use Blogger.

Using the logic above, this website should actually be on Wordpress and I do hope to migrate across sometime this year.

Let me know if I missed an advantage of disadvantage of Wordpress or Blogger...

Labels: blogger, wordpress