My sister asked me to create a website for her business. In all honesty, it’s been some time since I last made a website so I did some research before I started. I quickly found out that WordPress is now the dominating platform or content management system (CMS) as it is called. It’s also completely open source (GPL license) which is a big bonus for me. It therefore didn’t took me long to decide to use WordPress for the website.
While working with WordPress I was impressed by it’s the ease of use and the huge number of themes. Also the support on the internet is excellent. So I began asking myself if I should move my blog from Blogger to WordPress.
I use Blogger for over a year and, although is was a great way to start blogging, I have some doubts about the platform. The user interface is a bit of a mess, especially if you want to do more advanced stuff. Yes, you can import a theme, or even create your own but my guess is that most people don’t know how to do it. These options are hidden somewhere deep in the Blogger interface.
More importantly the Blogger website is owned by Google. Even worse Google also owns the content of your website. If Google decides to stop the Blogger.com service or if Google thinks that your website is in violation with their content policy and take your blog down you’re out of luck. WordPress.org doesn’t suffer from this. You download the WordPress software onto your server and you (not Google) are in control of every aspect of your blog.
It appears to me that the Blogger.com doesn’t get a lot of attention from Google. This last year I haven’t seen a major overhaul or new themes from Blogger.com. In fact some features are being removed. The blog posts on Blogger Buzz (the blog of Blogger.com) are sparse, which isn’t a good sign.
For the time being I will use both Blogger.com and WordPress. Maybe some annoying features of WordPress will pop-up later on. Also it will be interesting to compare the page views on both bogs. In a couple of months I’ll decide which blog platform I’ll prefer but as it stands now it probably will be WordPress.
Thanks for reading!