I just moved from Blogger to WordPress, and I’m loving it. Although I am only just beginning to explore what the software can do, I’ve already seen a few decided advantages over Blogger:
1) Extremely Customizable
If you know what you are doing and have your own FTP server, you can rip into the guts of your blog like a hungry zombie. Since WordPress allows you to download the entire open source framework and host it yourself on your server of choice, there are almost no limitations to what you can do with it.
On the other hand, if you don’t feel like going all “undead coder,” you can choose from hundreds of themes and plugins that never require you to open a css or php file, but still give you plenty of tools to make your blog your own. (Note that most of these options require that you have hosting; wordpress.com charges for all the extras – wordpress.org gives them away for free.)
The best part is, there is a large knowledge base and forum community to help figure out the many layers of WP.
2) Smooth Back-End Interface
Blogger’s dashboard felt outdated and clunky, but I just assumed that was par for the course. WordPress has shown me differently, however, with a clean, smooth interface that is arranged intuitively (for the most part).
You can see from the images below, it’s clear that WordPress has had some TLC that Blogger lacks. For one thing, WP utilizes the entire space; Blogger looks like it was built for a monitor resolution better suited to the ’90s.
The entire interface is just better designed, with better use of space, better organization of information, and smoother coding.
3) Categories for Your Categories
I blog about a variety of very different things, but none of them with enough volume to merit a variety of blogs. In Blogger, I organized them by a carefully chosen set of tags, but it always felt forced. WordPress addresses that need by allowing posts to be sorted by category, as well. The categories themselves nest, allowing for much finer control of the overall organization of a blog.
Not only posts can be categorized; I discovered today that feeds on my blogroll can also be organized in this way, and I can choose to show or omit each category. I follow a number of friends from Second Life, but I also follow a couple of gamer news sites, a friend’s blog, and a couple of design inspiration blogs. Now anyone who visits can quickly see which, if any, will interest them, and ignore the rest.
Closing Thoughts
To be honest, I’m disappointed in Google. Nearly everything they touch has magic (or maybe something more addictive – like crack) all over it, but Blogger is light-years behind WordPress. Perhaps the developers there have just thrown in the towel, conceding victory to WP. Either way, I’m never looking back. Between better core software and substantially more add-ons, WordPress is a pleasure to use and does exactly what I need it to.
