Wordpress or Blogger - which do you use and why?

[Zeldazog]

Hi All

I am about to start overhauling my website soon (happy with it overall, but having recently done some courses on SEO and E-Commerce, I now know I have to to do more than simply add a couple of pages, so I am going for it properly).

After some research and discussion (and asking your opinions on here) I've decided to go with Wordpress self-hosted software.  For those of you that saw my question about whether to go with that, Dreamweaver, Coffeecup, etc, I decided to try WP for several reasons; Having looked at some sites created in it I found they look nothing like blogs; knowing that shopping cart and many other add-ons are readily available; being told it was really easy to work with but probably importantly that Google likes Wordpress (So helps with ranking the site).

So, I have had a play and I like what I see.  When writing, you can add 'pages'or 'posts' - pages appear in navigation like a normal website, posts appear dated, tagged, etc and have all the gubbins in them to allow other stuff like Twitterfeed to work etc.

However, I've been running a blog on Blogger/Blogspot for aaageesss - I only have a few followers that are blogger account followers, but in actual fact, I really don't know how many people might have signed for email notifications, have an RSS feed or Google reader, have me bookmarked, click through from a blogroll in someone else's Blogspot page, etc.  In other words, I don't know how many people find my blog from other methods that I *don't* know about.

That said, blogging via Wordpress would mean a one-stop place to both update website, shop, gallery and blog.... that's got to be a time saver!  And the blog is then in my custom domain, which is bound to help google rankings, and whilst my blog and website are pretty similar, they are still, ultimately two seperate places.

So, do you use either of these, or would you *not* use one and why?


(Oh, another advantage to it all being on one place is that if I ever decided to overhaul the design of the website with a new banner and new colours, I'd only have to do the one thing, not the website and the blog to match)

[Dickie]

I know it's not exactly what you asked but you can import all your blogger posts into WordPress.

I assume you are using WordPress.com rather than downloading WordPress and hosting it yourself.

[Les]

I imported my blogger blog with no problems :-)

[sparrow]

...also not what you asked, but I adore Weebly (Follies is with Weebly, and that includes a blog).

[Lakelady]

I use Wordpress - it's simple to use, you can get it to look great, it gives you some stats......didn't like the look of blogger, but just a personal aesthetics thing  - can't really compare but I have no complaints re Wordpress 

[jeannette]

Wordpress all the way for me. I think it's got more functionality geared towards people appearing independent than blogger does. With anything that is provisioned, you have to live with some of the constraints, but the benefits outweighs it IMO. Last I checked, it had more themes and I'm not sure because I never had the patience with it, but I couldn't get rid of that blogger header, which just irritated the hell put of me...

Good luck.

[Zeldazog]

I know it's not exactly what you asked but you can import all your blogger posts into WordPress.
I assume you are using WordPress.com rather than downloading WordPress and hosting it yourself.

I figured I would be able to import the blog, which is what I would probably do - I am using the self-hosting Wordpress software (download, unzip, upload to my webspace) - because that way I can use my own domain name, because it's for the website.

....  but I couldn't get rid of that blogger header, which just irritated the hell put of me...

Yeah, that bugged me, I was able to customise my template enough to look like my website, aside from that (which at the time, I Didn't mind, as people could simply click follow on it)

[Zeldazog]

I know it's not exactly what you asked but you can import all your blogger posts into WordPress.
I assume you are using WordPress.com rather than downloading WordPress and hosting it yourself.

I figured I would be able to import the blog, which is what I would probably do, thanks for confirming I will be able to.  I am using the self-hosting Wordpress software (download, unzip, upload to my webspace) - because that way I can use my own domain name, because it's for the website.

....  but I couldn't get rid of that blogger header, which just irritated the hell put of me...

Yeah, that bugged me, I was able to customise my template enough to look like my website, aside from that (which at the time, I Didn't mind, as people could simply click follow on it)

[Miriam]

Although I am a web designer and can build my pages from scratch, I use wordpress self hosted a lot.
Wordpress is easy, it scores good on Google and for me important, you can change the layout totally apart from the core files. My www.miriamsteger.com is totally based on wordpress with a lot of tweaking on the back end. ;-)

[nemeton]

I'm now using the self-hosting Wordpress too - still very early days and I'm still very clueless, but so far I'm getting the hang of it, I think...