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I'm trying to decide between wordpress and blogspot for hosting my author blog. I've heard wordpress is better and I really like the idea that I can always upgrade to a .com website that's just my name rather than a .wordpress.com. There seem to be a lot of great options like that offered only by wordpress but I'm still really confused by what free services they offer vs their permium services associated with wordpress.org (for example are there options to add a custom theme to wordpress.com--not just the ones offered by wordpress but can one from another vendor/designer be installed?). I also know a lot of authors who use blogspot but I'm never very impressed with blogspot's design capabilities. However I am also considering finding someone to design my blog and I've noticed that designing for blogspot is much cheaper than designing for wordpress.

Which one do you think, overall, is the better tool when it comes to blogging/promoting etc?

Thanks!

Blogspot/blogger is easier to get up and running, but has less options.

Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org are two separate entities. Although they both use more or less the same Wordpress software, .com is for people who want a free blog.

.Org means you have to have your own server host, and install and set it up yourself.

.Com is easier, cheaper, but has less options.

.Org gives you the most freedom, where you can add whatever you like.

I'm a Wordpress fan - because I'm a luddite and I like how easy wordpress is! ;) I made a personalized header and I'm still on the free thingy - still thinking about the upgrade of my own domain. You can check my personalized wordpress blog at
At least it doesn't have the stupid Catchpa of Blogspot on comments (which half the time don't allow me to leave comments on Blogspot blogs, grrr) - but you can still control who can comment or not! ;)
And like Michael says, when I'll have a web page, I'll definitely download the software at Wordpress.org, at least I know how it works after 3 years, LOL!

I'm not sure either one is really better than the other. I've used Blogger and never really had a problem with it, though I admit that the themes and whatnot can be somewhat limited. If you're really interested in making many, many customizations then you're probably best off with Wordpress. But if you're really just looking to set something up that looks nice and then fiddle with the fonts or maybe the header image, either one will allow you some pretty decent freedom to do so.

And for what it's worth, Blogger does also allow you to upgrade your URL to remove the .blogspot from the address.

I'm happy with Wordpress.com - you can see what mine looks like here.

I love Wordpress. It's easier for me personally to manage. I once considered moving to blogspot but I've noticed that sometimes blogs I've seen there look crowded or hard to navigate. Though that could be the designers...

Blogspot: easy if you're new at blogging.

Wordpress.org: way better if you like having control, designing or at least heavily editing templates, and generally get your hands dirty.

Wordpress.com: in between.

Hey blog-o-philes !

Generally, I prefer WordPress.com [♥] for the same reasons other folks have mentioned.

However, when I come across Blogger blogs on Blogspot (try saying THAT out loud!), I sometimes want to comment on them. For that, I set up a Google Blogger account and profile.

Then, I realized that if readers followed my comments back to my profile, they'd look for a blog by me. So, I created one! Heck, WordPress.com and Blogger are both FREE! So, why not?

I'm still relatively new at blogging. My goal is to develop the blogs on the two different platforms for different purposes.

Here are my links:





-- H A L �

I too am very happy with Wordpress, especially its functionality. You can have a look here:

Personally, I like Wordpress because I think it looks nicer, cleaner cut and more professional. It also has a lot of cool features, like daily stats and whatnot. But sometimes I find it a bit complex to use and it can be frustrating on occasion. So really, blogger is probably easier to use, but I still prefer Wordpress.

Sylvia wrote: "Personally, I like Wordpress because I think it looks nicer, cleaner cut and more professional. It also has a lot of cool features, like daily stats and whatnot. But sometimes I find it a bit compl..."
It is quite complex, but the more I use it, the more I learn. YouTube is a total life saver for me!

Thanks for the feedback! I'm probably going to go with wordpress but like a few of you have mentioned I'm wondering how much i'll be able to itneract with people who use blogger or any other platform for that matter. The more I've looked into which is better the more I've concluded that it's definately wordpress but at the same time I feel like more people use blogger. Wordpress seems to be the popular choice for people wanting to create a webpage but not necessarily for your every day blogger. I just don't want to exclude myself from potential readers by choosing wordpress.

I have used blogger and wordpress and prefer wordpress. I agree with what Sylvia said about it being cleaner and more professional looking. Once you figure the "dashboard" out it is really easy to navigate. I have been tweaking it and so far am really pleased with the widget options and the fact that I can upload my own header image. See for yourself:

I'm a bigger fan of Wordpress more because of the advanced options. You aren't exactly free to do everything that you want, but there are far more options, especially if you're willing to invest in it.

I use blogspot and find it easy to use. In fact, I eventually moved my entire web site contents there and just switched my .com address to it. (Well, I kept anything worth keeping and not out of date.)



Denise, I post all of that at the same blog that I use as my author website. More new content means more visitors.

I post about movies, books, music, reader/writer resources, etc., amid news about my current or upcoming works.

Everything you post in blogs tends to show up quickly in Google, etc.


Duane Simolke

Thanks, Denise!

Wordpress is the best for search engine purposes (indexing, etc.) They have free plugins to help increase visibility on Google, combat spam, etc. A new Wordpress SEO plugin came out that's wonderful. I'm using it now. Webmasters recommend it over anything else in the market.

I've been on Blogger for over 5 years and have gotten to know the ins & outs of the platform from the perspective of a lover of technology who knows nothing about its inner workings. :-)

There are drawbacks like not being able to add Meta data or keywords (only labels which don't seem to have the same effect) like you can with Wordpress. But because I knew the blogger format so well, when I got my domain for , I knew I wanted a "free" host and opted to link to a blogger profile. All my editing / posting is done from one location (as opposed to having to remember another user id/pwd if joining WP). And I know that my blogs/website can all have the same look and feel due to the ability to use similar templates, font styles, etc.




Good luck with your decision!

I used blogger for a long time but moved to Tumblr as my primary blogging tool with an export of my more public posts to my main website. In terms of setting thing up, Tumblr is super easy - as is posting. But the added benefit is the networking component. Tumblr already has an infrastructure of users in place that are incredibly active and if you can build up a following there's a way to guarantee that they'll read your posts (it's the pin feature, which only costs $5 - it pins your post to the top of all your follower's dashboards). If the right person reblogs a post (which is as simple as clicking a button), their hundreds (or thousands) of followers will read it and so on. I've had some pretty popular posts using Tumblr, honestly, and I think I've expanded my readership pretty significantly.

As far as how I set it up...I have . It's basically all of the nonsense that comes to me on a day-to-day basis. I have a tag "forpublic" that I pipe to using which is a free service. I also use RSS Include for my my twitter, spotify, and picasa streams. This way I don't have to spend as much time trying to get people to come to me, I go to where the people are. If I want someone to check out my posts without all the noise, I send a link to my main website.

Just another alternative worth checking out. It took me a while to build up my follower list on Tumblr but now it's probably my main marketing tool for most of my projects, honestly.

I like both Blogger and Wordpress. Both have their problems, but on the whole both are sufficiently 'user-friendly'.




For making your own website, look at mrsite.com - reasonably priced, flexible, & easy to use. (PS: I have no financial interest in this site!)

How easy/difficult is it to move stuff from blogspot to wordpress or vice versa?

I don't think there is a proper way to export/import from one to the other.

You might have to copy and paste everything manually.

Thanks Michael.

@Hock - I would add that it would be wise to keep a copy of each page/post saved (on Notepad for instance) on your hard-drive. From that, simply copy and paste to wherever you wish.

Hock, if you are going from Blogger to Wordpress, it's easy, there is an import function under 'Tools' that does everything for you. ALTHOUGH, if you have any hidden code (like for google bots etc), then delete it BEFORE you import across to Wordpress. Otherwise, it becomes visible :-D

I was reading this in hopes of getting some information about blogger vs WordPress. It seems like people like WordPress because they believe it to be easier to use with limited web design skills. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I have intermediate design skills and think that blogger is very easy to use and is much easier to use than WordPress.

I wanted to clarify some things so others who read this won't get confused.

1. You can put in meta data on blogger. See this for instructions.

2. You can also have your own banners, pictures, and even your own complete design on Blogger. You can edit the templates if you'd like by choosing to only alter CSS styles, i.e. fonts, colors, etc. or change whatever you want by altering the raw HTML.

3. Blogger also allows comments without captcha codes. As far as native comments within Blogger, the author controls whether or not comments require captcha codes. You can turn that option on or off through settings-posts and comments. It is up to you. I personally use disqus and have inserted it using html.

Does anyone know if WordPress allows users to alter the pure HTML and if so, do they allow it for free or is that a premium service? It is often a lot easier and faster to alter the pure html than to find the appropriate widgets and the method of updating your page, which is one of my major gripes with WordPress. It seems like their platform makes changes a lot harder and longer than they have to be. I could not figure out how to access the raw code on WordPress.

The more I am reading, I think I will stay with Blogger. It seems as if they give users more freedom to create and their platform is completely free.

This provides a chart of WordPress features vs Blogger features. I found some discrepancies in the chart but nevertheless, it provides a usable breakdown of the features both blogging platforms have pitted against each other.

I use Tumblr and Blogger. I started with Tumblr but outgrew the platform rather quickly. They have too many restrictions but as a previous post says, they have a community of bloggers and you often get other bloggers that reblog you and follow your posts. Below are links to some of my blogs which all point to my domain name (for free):

Tumblr



Blogger


Anybody interested in getting free web hosting may want to check out .

I hope someone finds this post useful.
Kudos!

Hmmm, see this is the reason I changed to Wordpress, because no matter how hard I tried, my blogs were not showing up easily with organic google searches because I thought I couldn't add metadata. If I knew this a few months ago, I may have stayed with blogger (because I'm lazy) :-/

I like blogger.com. It is easy for novice bloggers like me. Adding Amazon affiliate is also easy here.
Check:

I do like and have been happy on blogger.com but your post has made me think that maybe I might change to WordPress or have both.
Here's my blog in it's current form you'll see I did customize but rally want it to look more like my website

I'm with Wordpress, margaretlynettesharp, and I'm quite happy. My only problem is that the pictures we upload sometimes go in the wrong places.

I've also been using WordPress since 2010, but it did take me a long time to figure out how to be extra careful with the edit image functions, especially how the text wraps, or doesn't. It also can be very slow updating an edit and re-posting. Aside from that, it handles a lot of traffic and is almost everywhere you want to be. Check it here: www.sailletales.com

I've set the homepage to be a static page on Wordpress.
I'd like to start a blog which I have posted, but it doesn't show up on my site.

I have created a static page with the same blog, but of course, this will never be a feed and will continually have to be added to as one long post.

Am I right in thinking that the blog page has to be the home page in Wordpress? I hope not. I'd love the blog page to be one of the other pages other than the home page.

Margaret wrote: "I'm with Wordpress, margaretlynettesharp, and I'm quite happy. My only problem is that the pictures we upload sometimes go in the wrong places."

I had that problem with one of the templates I was using. Only two of my featured images displayed. I had to test several other templates before all my images displayed.

Laekan wrote: "I'm trying to decide between wordpress and blogspot for hosting my author blog. I've heard wordpress is better and I really like the idea that I can always upgrade to a .com website that's just my ..."

You can omit the 'wordpress' from your url. It costs minimal to set up. I've done it at

Kevin, if you go Dashboard > Settings > Reading, at the top you should see the option of which page to display your posts on.

Hi guys, just stumbled across this page when I googled "wordpress vs blogger".

I wanted to expand my online presence so I wondered if there were more "blog" sites I could use. So here I am, I haven't heard of Wordpress until recently and the links/opinions shared here have convinced me to create one as well.

So far I only use Blogger

Clearchannel wrote: "Does anyone know if WordPress allows users to alter the pure HTML and if so, do they allow it for free or is that a premium service? It is often a lot easier and faster to alter the pure html than to find the appropriate widgets and the method of updating your page, which is one of my major gripes with WordPress. It seems like their platform makes changes a lot harder and longer than they have to be. I could not figure out how to access the raw code on WordPress...."

On Wordpress.com, no; like Blogger, it's a walled garden.

On Wordpress.org, absolutely. You can change the code on your theme, add HTML, build your own widgets, whatever. You'll need to be an HTML/CSS hack to do it, and you'll need to be careful how you update your theme (they tell you how to do it without setting yourself up to lose your changes with the next theme update).

Also on Wordpress.org, you have access to the whole constellation of themes and plugins -- far more than what you can get to on WP.com. So you may not need to do as much coding as you think.

Blogger and Wordpress.com are both easy to use platforms for creating and maintaining an author's blog. If that is what you want and nothing more, either would work. Blogger would offer an advantage in allowing google adsense where Wordpress.com would not.

In comparing the two platforms, it might be helpful to think of Wordpress as a Content Management System. Wordpress.com or a self-hosted Wordpress site would give you much more flexibility and you would be able to use Wordpress to build other sorts of websites that might require more sophistication or complexity than you could have using Blogger.

I use a self-hosted Wordpress installation for an online zine with image sliders and several pages that would be a lot more difficult to create using Blogger.

I used wordpress.org to set up the following website: .

If you are setting up an author's blog, you might also consider that under Blogger's terms of service, Google would own your content. This might not be super important to you, but it might be a factor in deciding between WP and Blogger.

We have been using WordPress since November and we love it! One of the members had blogspot a while ago, but didn't like it much. Personally, WordPress seems nicer with better layouts (even in the free version) than BlogSpot.


Check us out:

Hi
Interesting discussion here.
Doesn't the monster Google own Blogger so would you get more views on Blogger than Wordpress?

I used Blogger for an ad for my story.

I used to have a blogger blog... but just recently switched over to wordpress and I LOVE it so much. It's much more user-friendly, and I can do so much more with it than I could with blogger (I'm sure you CAN do everything in blogger that you can do in wordpress, but it just didn't seem as easy to figure out to me). I love the built-in site stats too.

As to the original question: I use wordpress.org, not .com, so I can't speak to what all is available with .com. A lot of the plugins I'm using are wordpress.com related (Jetpack is the main one and it's a .com feature).

Demetrius wrote: "Hi
Interesting discussion here.
Doesn't the monster Google own Blogger so would you get more views on Blogger than Wordpress?

I used Blogger for an ad for my story."

I'm not an expert, but I think Wordpress is more SEO friendly.

I am a weeeeee bit biased because I use WordPress every day. I have used Blogger once, and really did not like it very much. I am impressed with people who use Blogger though. My money still rests with WordPress.

Michael wrote: "Kevin, if you go Dashboard > Settings > Reading, at the top you should see the option of which page to display your posts on."

Thanks for that. It saves me a lot of work.

I LOVE using Wordpress (the software) and Hostgator as a host. One button install. 24/7 help. I like to "own" my own part of the web, and self-hosted blogs afford me that luxury. There are so many inexpensive hosting plans, it's worth spending the few bucks a month. The sky is the limit with Wordpress. You have tons of room for growth.

I have over five things on Blogger. More recently, I tried putting together something on Wordpress.
I'd appreciate any feedback or criticism.
Thanks.

for a .com blogger is cheaper at $7 a year plus you don;t need to pay for anything, but for interactions I'd say wordpress, people can comment using a variaty of social networks instea dof being "ann." on blogger.

I agree with you, Pia. I have heard a lot of good things about Hostgator. I use Bluehost, and I have been happy with it until just recently. They have been having some issues lately. I do get to use Cloudflare, included with my service, along with other apps such as Viglinks, Google Analytics, and others. Does Hostgator have a CDN that's included in its service?

Wordpress is easy to use, but they will add fees later on. I paid for my own domain and have done so for 3 years. Now they want me to pay for a No Ads Upgrade to prevent ads from being added to my posts. This is a recent development. Personally it irritates me that they are trying to force me to pay a fee for No Ads when I paid for it to be my own domain