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July 11, 2011

Choosing a blogging platform

Writing is a socially accepted form of getting naked.

As of February, 2011 there were 156 million blogs online. This statistic is shocking indeed! From the late 90s era of LiveJournal and Kiwibox, modern day blogging is a true proof of excellent digital evolution.

Blogs have their own important role to play within the social media mix. As a website that can be updated on the go, blogs are easy to navigate. Blogs can provide an incredible amount of information and allow readers to easily communicate with the author.

As a beginner, choosing the right blogging platform can be a daunting task. Google being its notorious self will offer you quite a few choices and by the time you are done reading reviews, you will probably lose the drive to write. Having written blogs for years I know first hand, how easy it is to get distracted. One minute you have a brilliant idea and want the world to know, the next, that drive has disappeared and you give up.

If you are thinking of starting a blog, points below are something you should consider. A good blogging platform will offer,

  1. Free service
  2. Quick indexation within search engines
  3. Easy usability
  4. Allowing multiple authors to post
  5. Quick interaction with readers
  6. Template variety
  7. Traffic statistics
  8. Personal domain mapping
Image via BlogBloke
Wordpress and Blogger are two highly popular blogging platforms. If you are a newbie to blogging, I suggest choosing either of these two. I personally started off with Wordpress.

Wordpress and Blogger offer similar services but there are pros and cons to both,

Similarities:
  • Free Service (Easy registration)
  • Easy navigation
  • Creation of multiple blogs under same user account
  • Allowing multiple authors
  • Quick indexation within search engines
  • Quick interaction with readers
  • Mobile blogging
  • Option to use basic HTML within blog posts
  • Spam protection
  • Quick comments

Differences:
  • Wordpress offers a community feel that Blogger doesn't. You log into Wordpress and you are given a display of various blog reads of the day which they call "freshly pressed". I personally think Wordpress ranks higher in terms of doubling up as a social network. Another thing I love about Wordpress is its interface, although Google has recently set up a cleaner looking Blogger which you can access via draft.blogger.com. This should go mainstream soon.

  • Blogger offers customisation of templates for free. If you are a basic or intermediate level designer, that is you know your way around HTML and some CSS, the template options available to you are endless. There are a variety of sources online that offer free blogger templates that usually need a little bit of tweaking. On the other hand, for $30 a year, Wordpress lets you customise your font and tweak designs on available Wordpress templates. You don't need any knowledge of designing to do this. (If you want personalised templates on Wordpress, you have to look at the advanced option of downloading Wordpress.org Content Management System and hosting it on your own domain. This is something you can try once you've had some time working your way around basic blogging.)

  • Blogger allows third party scripts. For example, you may want to add a particular social bookmarks tab to your blog, through the site layout option on Blogger, you can add third party scripts. Wordpress does not offer this option. Having said that, Wordpress itself offers some great widgets to play with.

  • Blogger offers free domain mapping where as you have to pay about $12 to do the same on Wordpress. Domain mapping means you can buy your own domain (Wordpress & Blogger allow you an option to go domain shopping) and have the domain redirected to your blog. For example, I have my domain Rhetoricalcocktail.co.uk mapped to my wordpress blog.

  • In the case that you have two blogs on two different platforms, Wordpress will allow you to import a blog from a variety of different blogging platforms including Blogger while Blogger will only let you import another Blogger blog.

  • Wordpress allows quick automatic distribution of blog feeds to Facebook, Messenger Connect and Twitter. So far I haven't been able to find a simpler way to do that on Blogger. I am currently using Dlvr.it You can use a third party application called Social RSS on Facebook to import your Blogger feeds to your wall.

  • Wordpress has its traffic tracking stats system which is highly keyword centric. Blogger on the other hand offers slightly diverse statistics including a map overlay of where your visitors came from. An advantage of using Blogger is that you can set up your own Google Analytics tracking! To do so within the Wordpress platform, you will have to move into the advanced world of Wordpress.org

My personal opinion is that if you don't have any experience with HTML, stick to Wordpress. It is a great platform for new bloggers. If you love designing, want to get out of your comfort zone and learn more, use Blogger! You can do a lot with your Blogger for free. And if you are on an advanced level, try Wordpress.org. It will offer you a brilliant learning experience on how to build your blog from scratch.

Thanks to @kerenleah for giving me the idea to blog about this ;-) Visit her blog at http://girltorque.posterous.com/  

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