Blogging Basics - Which Blog Platform?

This is the second article in my Blogging Basics series. One of the biggest decision a blogger faces is deciding which platform to use for their blog. In this post I hope to weigh up the pros and cons of the two most popular platforms - Blogger.com and Wordpress.org to help you make your decision.

Firstly the choice you make will more than likely depend on several factors, these are:

• Your Goals - Are you doing this for fun or is it more professional?
• Your Budget - How much are you willing to spend to achieve this goal?
• Your Individual Skill - How technically able are you?

When you have though on these questions the next thing to do is look at the pros and cons of these 3 platforms and see which fits your answer best.

Blogger
Blogger Pros

• Very easy and quick set up, most peoples first taste of blogging.
• Everything is completely free, they will even host your blog and give you a free sub-domain, let you create a custom domain or transfer an existing one.
  
• Simple, easy to adjust your blogs layout and design and has a built in template HTML editor.
• Lots of useful widgets including easy to apply Google Adsense, all through Blogger.
• Blogger handles all your server and hosting problems so you don't have to worry about any of it.
• Google seems to index Blogger blogs faster than other blogs.

Blogger Cons

• Difficult to add external widgets into Blogger unlike WordPress.
• Very few intitial templates to use from and all fairly similar.
• Very simple, hard to design more complexly.
• Fairly slow to load because of high traffic through Blogger.
• Blogger can ban members and delete their blogs if they do not like the content.

WordPress.Org
WordPress Pros

• Software is completely free, and you get your own site and domain as long as you renew your domain and pay for hosting.
• Easy to setup, it's known for its 5 minute installation.
• Very customizable allowing users to be completely individual and design it any way you want.
• Easy to run, just log in and start writing, no slow publishing.
• Great, updated support in their online forum.
• Huge amounts of themes, plug ins and widgets with the option to let users add external plug ins, etc.

Wordpress Cons

• For the less technically able the learning curve needed to use Wordpress effectively can seem very challenging.
• The base text editor used in WordPress is fairly basic.
• You have to pay for your own hosting and domain name.
• Some WordPress plug-ins can make your server slow.
  

Overall Blogger is perfect for newer bloggers that are still learning and may not have the technical ability to use WordPress, it is also completely free and quick to set up so you can be posting in minutes. on the other hand WordPress lets the blogger to be more creative and enables better customization and options.

Other Useful Blog Platforms:
Movable Type
Wordpress.com
TypePad