Step 3, How to choose your blogging service

As you know, I am currently using Blogger made by Google to write all of my articles, however, I found out through forums, that other people had started to talk about other blogging software, like Wordpress. Well, is it really any good? I’ll try and outline the main pros and cons of having Wordpress compared to Blogger.

1- Both Blogger and Wordpress are free, but with the Full version of wordpress you will have to pay for web hosting and domain name registeration.

2- Blogger doesn't have a category feature, One of the main features of Wordpress is categories... to all the people reading this post, I know you might get into hard time trying to search for an old post in this blog.. Sorry I'm using blogger.

3- It is very easy to use Blogger using the WYSIWYG editor, with previews available before you have to publish the article/template. Wordpress, although easy to write articles, does require amateur knowledge of HTML/CSS, which is one of the reasons which I was more inclined to using Blogger. For all you pro’s though who can handle the messy stuff Wordpress is the way, but being realistic, most of the population doesnt have a clue about CSS, and WordPress has no preview.

4- Wordpress is a popularity driven blogging platform. The home page displays top blogs and blogs of the minute and also displays top tags. In this sense, it is perfect for people who are looking to get readership by writing really good stuff. Unlike blogger it also shows the faster growing blogs. So it definitely ranks above blogger when it comes to getting more readership. Its friends surfer and blogroll features provide for a very effective community building tool.

5- Blogger has few themes, with room for adsense to fit in your blog... while on the other hand Wordpress has more than 400 themes.. most of them look really good.

6- Blogger has recently introduced the concept of custom widget. This is a very important step towards getting people interested in implementing their own ideas and having an active community involved in working for developing blogger as a whole.

7- Blogger FTP connection is too poor, compared to wordpress.

8- The most important factor, Blogger gets indexed by Google faster than wordpress!!! Which is really an important factor to consider.

To summarize I would suggest that for a user new to the idea of blogging, Blogger still seems to be a much better option. Its more interactive and offers very little unnecessary detailing on the dashboard. It probably attracts more user who are first time bloggers.

For a user who has come experience of blogging, Wordpress is a much better tool. It gives the user a power to understand his readership details. Usage stat graphs and per post stats are a wonderful innovation and once a user is used to it, its difficult to live without a dashboard as detailed as Wordpress.

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