If you’re considering starting a blog, you have no doubt considered whether or not to use Google’s Blogger. If you did any kind of research on the matter, you quickly uncovered a hotbed of hatred towards the service:
- People hate Blogger because it is a haven for automated blogs that are nothing more than fronts for spammy advertising (called splogs, for spam + blogs).
- People hate Blogger because its commenting system is bizarre and unwieldy.
- People hate Blogger because it doesn’t give you pages or tags (they have to completely buck convention and use the word labels while the entire rest of the damn world uses the word tags. That’s almost Microsoftian!
- People hate Blogger because it’s easy for others to get your blog banned because they disagree with your beliefs or they simply don’t like your blog.
- People hate Blogger because it’s owned by someone else and they don’t have as much control over things as they’d like.
- A professional or business person would simply never use Blogger, because it conveys an amateur sensibility.
My first blogs were on Blogger, back before Google owned it. It was really the only service of its kind at the time. Since then, WordPress has shot past Blogger in prestige and credibility. I myself have come down pretty hard on Blogger in the past. No doubt that’s partly motivated by my WordPress-dependent livelihood, but I’ve spent tons of time on both platforms.
Being a more advanced blogger, I prefer WordPress. But is that reason enough to hate on Blogger? No. In fact, the newest beta version of Blogger is better than ever. But does Blogger really have any other advantages over other blogging platforms?
Yes! Go ahead, send me your hate, but it’s true. Blogger has its advantages. Here they are:
- Blogger is just ridiculously easier when it comes to pictures and video. This is something WordPress never has gotten right. Getting pictures into posts on Blogger is blessed simplicity compared to the overwrought image uploading monstrosity that is WordPress.
- Blogger lets you make deep and meaningful changes to its templates without requiring you to know HTML and CSS. Only a very few WordPress themes allow this.
- Blogger lets you edit sidebar content in a way that allows for nearly anything–but without writing a single line of code. WordPress has sidebar widgets that are severely limited in their ease-of-use by a non-coder.
- The amount of time, money, and frustration you must deal with using a hosted WordPress blog is colossal compared to Blogger. Between the WordPress upgrades and configurations, WordPress gives you never-ending work.
Now, hold on a minute, Michael! Don’t you make your money from WordPress? Why would you say these things? It’s true. I earn my living designing WordPress blogs and more as part of my blog consulting services. And WordPress does present a more professional image, which is vital for a business. But money and branding up front are not always the most important things to us. Saving time through ease-of-use could be a fatal blow for other blogging systems.
In the past, I’ve recommended that beginners create a starter blog in order to really learn blogging and avoid analysis paralysis when first starting out. That starter blog should be on Blogger if a beginner wants to experiment with monetization strategies, because the use of JavaScript is allowed on Blogger. It is not allowed on WordPress.com, the other popular free blog host.
When you are part of a group, and most of the members of that group adopt a practice or a method, it’s likely you will want to adopt it, too. Many artists and craftspeople have taken to Blogger. If you count yourself among them, using Blogger means you’re showing yourself to be a part of the group. All your artist and crafter friends are familiar with Blogger, too, so it makes sense for you to use it.
So is Blogger really that bad? I think I’ve done OK in presenting the advantages and disadvantages, but let me know what you think. But I think that depending on what you’re doing, Blogger might be right for you.
41 Comments
The new blogger commenting system is a lot better. I have noticed on many of the blogs that are hosted there that it is a lot more like WordPress so many times you do not even know that you’re on a blog or website.
I started on WP and as long as It keeps working…i’m stayin on WP. There’s too many options that I can control. Plus I don’t mind learning something new to make changes.
Michael,
Truly great post! It’s nice to see a fair and balanced look at this particular topic, absent the vitriol common to most treatments on WP blogs.
My own blog, Smithereens, is still hosted on Blogger and I have found it to be more than adequate as a starter platform over the past 2 months since I launched it. The freedom to edit HTML as you please is a big plus, and has allowed me to style my blog at least as nicely as any custom WP theme (I think.)
When I first started, I heard so much smack talk about Blogger and so much praise for Wordpress that I initially launched Smithereens on Wordpress.COM, thinking it was the same as the hosted variation.
Big mistake. My experience with the dot-com version of WP was so bad that I had switched to Blogger within a week and wrote a post called The Top 5 Reasons I left Wordpress.com for Blogger, which has actually been one of the most read posts on my blog so far.
While I may eventually make the jump over to hosted WP, just to have more total control and take advantage of the great plugin ecosystem, I agree that Blogger is not at all the monster many make it out to be, and I have to say that it gets a little tiring to hear the slight condescending remarks about “still being on Blogger” from other bloggers who use WP. I wonder if uber-Blogger-bloggers like Google Operating System’s Ionut Chitu still get that kind of feedback?
Ok, ok, /rant
Daniel Smith
Smithereens Blog
Productivity, Persuasion, Prose.
Like you I started with Blogger but now have a wordpress.com blog - I made the mistake not to test the service before starting my blog and thought it must be a good service because so many bloggers tell you how good WordPress is… This was a big mistake - wordpress.com is an O.K. service, but Blogger was much, much better. As you describe it quite well e.g. uploading media (a simple image!) can be a complicated task indeed on WordPress… Or you can’t edit your own CSS style sheet on wordpress.com without having to pay for this first (I could do that at Blogger), there is no way to add the standard RSS icon that everyone knows and uses on wordpress.com (you have to add a rather ugly widget that does not really look too much like the real icon that people know), and also wordpress.com does not use “tags” just as the rest of the blogossphere does but they have “categories” (this is just as unfortunate as Blogger’s choice to call their tags “labels”).
I find the WordPress user interface not very intuitive and often confusing, things seem never to be where I expect them to be. (To be fair: this is better since the last WordPress updated, but still behind the usability of Blogger.) Wordpress.com also does not allow me to embed my own videos from blip.tv, they only support a few of the big hosting sites like YouTube and Google Video, but those don’t support Creative Commons licenses…! So if you want to support open-source software and use the free wordpress.com service you simply can’t use/embed video from services that support Creative Commons licenses… This is not in the opens-source spirit I would think. Wordpress.com says they have to do this because of security concerns, but this makes me wonder: why can Blogger (securely) handle blip.tv Flash Video (= embedded JavaScript code) and worpdpress.com can’t…? Is this a problem with the wordpress.com service or is WordPress, the software, not secure enough to handle it…?
After two years on wordpress.com (and at the same time guest blogging on two other blogging projects where we use a WordPress installation) I’ve almost given up on WordPress. Yes, once published and edited (again and again and again…) blog entries do look very nice, but getting there takes so much time… I don’t want to go back to Blogger simply because I’m going to host my next blog on my own server, but as much as I want to support and use open-source software I probably will choose another open-source package, there are so many things that make WordPress too frustrating to use for me, e.g. the blog editor, the one thing that really should work, is still so buggy (e.g. when editing/deleting formated text in Visual mode too often you have to switch to HTML mode because some tags are not deleted correctly and the layout gets messed up - this always feels like coding to me and not like writing… Why does it have to be so difficult to edit a simple text document…?!)
I wish I could recommend WordPress, but if someone is new to blogging it might be better to sign up for that Google account (unfortunately you have to do this since the Blogger update from a year or two ago) and get started on Blogger. Later on you could move to your own server and find a blogging software that suits your needs… My advice: do test WordPress thoroughly first before deciding to use it…
I don’t have anything against Blogger, but I’m not a fan of hosted blogging systems, including WordPress.com. Certainly they’re fine to use if you’re just getting to know blogging (I tested the water for two or three weeks using Blogger and WP.com few years ago) or you’re running a personal blog, but I think all professional blogs need to move to a self-hosted platform at some point.
If not for the greater control, because people will (not might) leave your site if they notice it’s hosted. Good post, Michael, it’s good to see a balanced look at Blogger in light of other hosted systems.
I agree in the sense that I’m skeptical whenever I see a Blogger platform in use. The problem with Blogger users is the limited default templates- they’re designed to address strict browser trends (at that time), so it look hideous today.
What Blogger users should do is swap the default template, use the in-line comment form and replace the favicon.
BTW, I have both Blogger and self-installed WP blogs. Simply love Blogger for its free hosting and bandwidth.
Great comments, everyone. I have some thoughts that came to me as I was reading them.
@Ultimate - Yes, the new comments are easier, and thank goodness! This has been Blogger’s weakness from the beginning. Unlike WordPress’ stupid picture uploading system, Blogger is improving theirs.
@Eathan - I hear ya. Many people don’t feel they should have to undergo a huge slog to learn the ins and outs of WordPress. Their time is too valuable. That’s what they pay others for. They just want to write posts.
@indiworks - Yup. There is much speculation about why WordPress.com disallows JavaScript. When you look at what a splog-fest Blogger has become, you can’t really blame them. Some think that WordPress.com is preparing its own advertising service.
@Joel - Thanks for the kind words. You bring up an interesting point, saying that people will leave if they notice it’s 3rd party hosted.
I think it depends on the audience. Tech-savvy? Yes, they will look down on a Blogger blog. Everybody else in the whole wide world? Mmm… not so much. They don’t know and they don’t care.
@Black Zedd - Free hosting and bandwidth are wonderful, aren’t they? That’s why I love video services like YouTube and Viddler. The problems with Blogger go deeper than the template selections, however. And unlike WordPress.com, you can edit a Blogger template visually without coding.
I too am instantly skeptical when I see a Blogger blog. My splog-induced fight-or-flight reaction is poised. But there are great blogs on Blogger, and many of them are by artists and craftspeople.
As a Blogger user, when I first saw your post title, I thought, “Eek!” but I was glad to see that you brought up some of Blogger’s strengths. I’m personally trying to learn more about WordPress and considering switching at some point, so I appreciate the balanced comparison. Blogger certainly has its limitations, but it can be well-used for certain purposes (so far, I fit right into your artist/crafter/personal category, and you’re right, it’s familiar to the community). I have to admit I completely cringe at the blogs I see where the user is still using the dotty or other templates with no modification, but I’ve seen some Blogger blogs that are actually not unpleasant to look at.
I love my wordpress way too much to care about blogger. I started out on blogger until someone turned me on to wordpress. I love the seo capabilities and cms like management. It has never been a hassle even with my limited programming skills.
The only draw back I see is SEO with google, since google loves google, you get dropped to the bottom. I`m surprised you didn`t mention it!
I agree that it’s good to use free services to test the blogging waters. There are a couple of problems with this, though:
1. A blogger waits too long to switch to a better platform, their blog takes off, they need more functionality than Blogger offers, and their stuck with one headache of a switch that can lose readers.
2. People never learn the skills they need to move past simply posting. They’re wannabe bloggers. When they do move to WP, they realize, “Shit. There’s more to blogging than drag and drop?” Then they’re stuck smashing down their “blogging is easy” mindset and starting all over from scratch.
Learn, but learn to let go and move - especially if you have a business or a gateway blog.
Michael,
So nicely said. I’m a big believer in ease of use as you begin, or if the site is going to remain personal. We’re all busy people; why complicate things, especially when many blogs just don’t last that long?
TypePad had me at hello because of that ease. Not having used Blogger, I’m impressed that a free platform could be as easy as you describe. Sounds easier than TP!
Personally, what I worry about with Blogger sites is that the hoops to comment drive people away in droves, which is a big growth inhibitor.
WP images: I made the switch two months ago and I’m just getting the hang of it, grr. I don’t find anything else about WP that different or any harder than TP, but that may not apply to Blogger.
You also deftly explained why folks dislike it, so I don’t think this ad for Blogger will be affecting your business too deeply.
Regards,
Kelly
@Daniel - Oops, I missed you in the last round of replies to comments: sorry! The difference between the hosted and the self-hosted versions of WordPress are many. At first glance, it wouldn’t seem so, but they’re very sneaky! The combination of restrictions and ease on WordPress.com is maddening to me. I love having total control of a self-hosted blog, and my clients benefit from that, too, because I handle the tricky stuff for them.
@Nicole - When you look at some of the themes, plugins, and capabilities of WordPress as a portfolio or creative process blog, you can see how it can make your blog a very high cut above all the rest.
@Elaine - I’m not sure what you’re trying to say: that Blogger has good SEO or lousy SEO? WordPress certainly has decent SEO, and can be made to have excellent SEO with a little additional work.
@James - Waiting too long to cut the cord on the starter blog is common, yup. That does get a mention in my starter blogpost. If the switch is made early enough (while you don’t have that many readers to lose) the damage will be minimal. Another long-term loss is PageRank and search results rankings, unless you had your own domain mapped to Blogger and you can get WordPress’ permalinks to match Blogger’s, you’re screwed.
I was glad to start out on TypePad, it suited my needs just fine. But I did wait too long, and now it’s about 10x harder than it should have been. 6 months ago (which was 6 months into the blog) would have been terrific.
Still, all things considered, I’m glad I just moved forward and got started with TypePad rather than waiting until I could get my act together for self-hosted WordPress. (WP.com was not an option, I wanted the freedom to monetize it as I pleased.)
My wife has a site on Blogger for her art. She thinks it’s simple and she has no tech experience. She writes her articles, labels them incorrectly
and uploads her own pix to the post. She’s happy.
A lot of her artist friends use Blogger except for some of the well known artists or folks who want to spend some money to have other people set things up for them.
My wife wants Wordpress because she’s heard so much about it from other people but I think it will be too hard for her. I’m thinking if I set it up for her, I’ll train her to use Windows Live Writer or some simple editor so she can write her blog posts and place the pix in the post and I’d do the rest. But, I almost hate for her to move off of Blogger.
Another advantage is that blogger allows you to monetize with adsense and affiliate links, where as the hosted wordpress.com does not allow you to use any of these.
If you want to begin experimenting with blog monetization, then blogger may be the best choice.
Thanks for your post! Very helpful!
Michael,
I started a Wordpress blog in June 2008 after doing a little research on different blogging platforms. Thank you so much for this article. If nothing else, I needed to learn the term non-coder because when I go to the forums looking for help I do not understand what the heck most of the responses mean.
I didn’t want to ask them to respond in Wordpress for Dummies language because I’m no dummy. I am an non-coder.
Thanks!
@Sonia - TypePad has its oddities and Blogger is easier. You have more control over your blog with TypePad than with WordPress.com. If you want a professional self-hosted blog that’s familiar to you, you may want to consider using Moveable Type, which is the self-hosted version of TypePad. I believe it’s open source and free. However, you will not find even a tenth of the resources for it as WordPress has.
@Kelly - The big difference between Blogger and TypePad is that Blogger is free and TypePad costs money (for any real options).
@Bill - Windows Live Writer is fantastic software for Blogger as well as WordPress, so there’s no reason for her to not start using it now. If she’s ready to take the next step in professional representation online as an artist, then WordPress probably would be better in all ways except ease of use. With Windows Live Writer, pictures and post writing are a breeze.
@Erica - Exactly. The codes used for those all use the JavaScript language. In Blogger, you don’t really have to see it or mess with it much. WordPress.com disallows any JavaScript in the code, so no ads.
@Valerie - The “Dummies” books are excellent, as are their online resources. If I were you, I wouldn’t hesitate to use them. I highly recommend them.
As you have just learned, sometimes knowing the right “label” to stick on something is more than half the battle. Non-coder, indeed!
Michael, what do you consider Typepad’s “oddities”? I chose it a few months ago, as a brand new blogger, because WP seemed a bit intimidating. Not sure it would be worth switching from Typepad to WP.
@Jean - I’ve only heard these second-hand, but people have said that TypePad makes you republish your blog when you make changes to it, which is something that went out with the internet dinosaurs.
I’ve also heard people say that how things are done and where controls are located isn’t intuitive. But that really depends on what you first learn on. Your first blog software will “imprint” on your as being “right” and you’ll judge any future platforms against it.
Jean,
TypePad’s oddity for me was not allowing plugins such as WordPress does. Not having email subscribe-to-comments cuts down so much on the conversation. Like now. If Michael were at TP, I wouldn’t have read your comment.
The switch stinks, and as Sonia and I know, the longer you wait to do it the more it stinks, but to foster a sense of community—for that one plugin alone—I’d say it’s worth it.
Regards,
Kelly
Michael,
Ha! The imprint is so true. I liked everything about TP (except the plugin issue), so for me WordPress is doing everything wrong, wrong. Readership is way up and the comment section is lively, so I can’t complain.
Until later,
Kelly
@Kelly - That’s not so much an oddity as a crime.
If your readership is up and comments are lively, you should be celebrating (but don’t get lax)!
Lax is not in my vocabulary.
I do not hate any blog platform. At the start of blogging, i used blogger for a while and then stopped using it. and I have used wordpress. So i prefer wordprss than blogger. It is because i got accustomed to is.
Google search engine loves blogger - and that alone is a very strong reason to use it.
99% of my traffic comes from Google. My wordpress blog gets hardly any hits at all.
The whole Blogger-vs-Wordpress debate always reminds me of the near-warfare that can break out over Mac-vs-PC! I’ve used both, and both hosted WP and WP.com, as well as other blogging platforms: each has its strengths, depending on the blogger’s tech skills and comfort level, and on what he/she wants to accomplish. So, no, Blogger is not “that bad” at all.
Reading what you said about one’s first blogging software “imprinting” on our minds as the “right” way to do things, I was nodding emphatically. And this may be one reason why Wordpress is picking up a lot of grumbles since introducing 2.5 and 2.6 — too many fundamental changes, too quickly, and too many of those that changes directly affect the blogger’s workflow, without necessarily giving a clear benefit. (Don’t get me started on the convoluted media-uploading process!)
A nice conversation-starter, this, Michael: thanks for such a balanced post.
@Clangnuts - I don’t think there’s any definitive proof that Google give Blogger blogs special treatment. In my own experience, I haven’t noticed any greater frequency of Blogger blogs appearing in results when I search. I get a lot of self-hosted WordPress blogs, though, and in my opinion that is caused by the superior SEO potential of a self-hosted WordPress blog.
It’s well-known that Google loves subdomains, though, and that may be a big part of it. Google treats subdomains as independent sites. (For those of you who don’t know, a subdomain looks like this:
keyword.domain.com.) Look at all the huge sites out there that kill it in search: they all use subdomains (and they’re just huge).@Rebecca - Puting two things on the table and asking which is better will always start a discussion!
I don’t know the ins and outs of it. I’m no expert in these matters, but many of my posts have shown up on Google so quickly, and so high up - that the only conclusion I can come up with is that Google does view Blogger blogs favorably. It’s just anecdotal of course.
@Clangnuts - Google generally seems to be indexing new blog posts from all blog systems within 10 - 30 minutes after posting. This is a recent change for them.
If you’re using the same keywords as your audience, getting near the top of the first page of SERPs is significant. If you’re using keywords that your audience isn’t really searching for (but you only think they are), high placement for irrelevant keywords only creates the illusion of success. I hope your situation is the former.
Drupal.
That was my first experience with blogging platforms. The site was hosted and maintained by an entrepreneur so, in that respect, it was the same as Blogger and WordPress.com.
Fortunately for me, it was a positive experience, and gave me the courage to self-host.
My only complaint with Blogger is that, using Firefox, I can’t seem to get the Captcha images required to comment. As a result, I only comment on Blogger, if I really, really have something to say.
The irony is how seamlessly the rest of my Google-backed websites work.
Cheers,
Mitch
@Mitch - I haven’t heard that was a problem. I haven’t experienced it myself. There is no info on why that happens?
Michael, I’m not sure if it’s a setting on Firefox, in which case, it’s my own fault. However, captcha works on most other blogs.
Maybe Blogger uses a different mechanism?
Cheers,
Mitch
Great article. My friends and I were actually discussing the pros and cons of Blogger and WordPress over the last few weeks. For the last few years, we ran a blog on Blogger just for friends, but we wanted to expand and let the public view our thoughts. After testing Blogger and WordPress, we eventually decided on paying Godaddy to host a Wordpress 2.6 blog.
In the process, we learned what we liked about both Blogger and Wordpress. In fact, that was our first post in our new blog Simplecritics.com that just launched a few days ago. Check it out. Our first three posts have been about Blogger and/or WordPress.
Wow - what a great site Michael. Really.
My photography “students” are finding out Bloggers limitations as well:
Lack of control, lack of control, lack of control.
I have been harping on them to switch over to a self-hosted version of WordPress. Some do some don’t.
As much as I love WordPress, it has a few limitations, though minor…
The first and most important is the flawed “nofollow” tag that is installed by default. When will WordPress understand that there is a thing called “Comment Moderation” that they have included in the set up?
Still no killer WordPress Bible out there - a few honorable mentions like WordPress Complete (forget WordPress 2, not worth the money IMHO).
Well it’s time to subscribe to your blog - and it’s a rarity when I do!
Thanks,
Rob Oresteen
chicago wedding & family photographer
@Bobblehead - Thanks for mentioning your posts. If people want to see other takes on the debate, they can check out your blog.
@Rob - Thanks for subscribing, it is much appreciated. There are plugins that remove the nofollow attribute from comment links.
Funny you mention the lack of a WordPress “Bible”. WordPress is one of those things that are difficult to learn from a book. Online multimedia learning is really the way to go. Keep your eyes peeled here at Remarkablogger. I’ve got some plans for the future I can’t really reveal just yet (but I can hint mysteriously about them).
Before I bought my own domain, I used the Blogger platform. I must admit that it was really easy to use, but it really seemed “cookie-cutter”-ish to me, as just about every other blog I visited was a Blogspot blog.
I’ve since moved on to WordPress, which I really like. I’m no HTML expert, and changing my blog has been difficult at times, but I feel I’ve learned some valuable coding lessons through trial and error, which I wouldn’t have been able to learn using Blogger. I also like WP’s functionality a lot better than Blogger’s.
@Mikey - Yup. You will have to mess with the html at some point on a WordPress blog!
I actually have blogs on both word press.com and blogger in trying to determine which i am more comfortable with .
The biggest difference i have found to date is that to many functions within blogger layout don’t function
And worse , you can’t get any support to straighten out the problem .
I also have a stand alone blog using word press .org but find myself spending far to much time trying to learn how to do things and i have no inclination to learn html .
@Alan - That’s a good summarization of all three for most people. The advantages of a self-hosted WordPress blog are undeniable, but it can also be an undeniable tech nightmare.
That’s why people hire me.
I just gotta say something, yes people will leave a blog if they see that they’re on a hosted service - IF THEY’RE SNOBS!
Yes, it is more professional to see a .com, but an intelligent type of person who sees content for what is, and in turn, people for who they are, instead of what they appear to be will see things in a better light.
A lot of amazing stuff can be done on blogspot, you can make your blog look exactly like a professional blog, I have, and all I needed to do was edit the HTML, which you can’t do on Wordpress. And even when I switch over to my own domain, I’ll still use blogger because it’s ridiculous to use Wordpress. SEO tweaks are amazing, but if you spend so much time tweaking and uploading pics is a mess, and there are so many problems with wordpress, you’ll spend so much more time tweaking instead of actually blogging, and that’s valuable time lost. People spend hours tweaking wordpress. Bloggers on blogspot can post 20 posts in those hours, add that up, and SEO wise there is your advantage for blogger if you know how to do it right.
@Vivian - I wouldn’t say “snobs” because the real issue here is about what’s appropriate for your audience. I wouldn’t run a cutting-edge technology blog on Blogger, for example. But most people don’t know and don’t care about the finer points of domains and what they mean. Thanks for your comment!
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