Blogger and Wordpress? What’s the differences?

If you never have any previous experience in blogging before, then I would recommend two blog platforms that you can get for free, Blogger and Wordpress. I recommend these platforms because their high usability and many people use them. With those huge user community, you could share your idea and tips with many other user. You could also search many tutorials and helps on using Blogger and Wordpress through Google Search because there is so many people who blogged about that subject.

So, the question in your mind right now might be,

“What’s the different?”

In my opinion, the most fundamental difference from these two platforms was Wordpress is an open source system and Blogger isn’t. These differences would be very influential when you wanted to modify a few function in your Blogger blog, especially when your modification was in the core of the blog software. Developed as an open source blog engine, Wordpress have a huge community members and supporters that help in the development of this blog platform. Many people can make changes and adjustments to their Wordpress blogs, either by hardcoding their Wordpress scripts or by installing Wordpress Plugins.

Did I make you confused?? I hope not. To make things simpler for you to make your choice, I will try to list a few considerable things between Blogger and Wordpress blogs. I need to remind you that this Blogger-Wordpress comparation was made by assuming that you will have your blog hosted free in Blogger or Wordpress.com.

Template or Site/Blogs Look

If you were a person who really care about your site looks and would like to change it frequently, and you don’t have a pro HTML or CSS programming capability, then I would recommend you to use Blogger platform than Wordpress. Blogger provides template uploads feature for their users. This make things simpler for you to change your Blogger blog themes as easy as upload the XML Blogger template files to Blogger server. Wordpress free blog provider that uses Wordpress MU tends to only provides you with a selection of themes. The change you could make to those themes could be done by using CSS overrides features. This feature only allows minor changes to your Wordpress blog looks. So I conclude that in the term of site looks changeability, Blogger is better than Wordpress, especially because Blogger gave us full access to their HTML template forms so we could add a few meta tags to our Blogger Templates.

Page Elements Configuration

In Blogger, we could arrange our blog’s page elements from Header to Footer in a drag-and-drop environment. Simply said, you could put anything visually in Blogger page element configuration page, even when you were clueless about HTML or CSS. On the contrary, Wordpress free blog provider usually only allows us to configure sidebars elements only. So, in blog Page Element Configuration, Blogger bested Wordpress once again.

Navigation

For articles organization, Blogger apply Label system for their articles. And sometimes, for SEO reason, blog user put one articles in multiple labels. The problem is, when you add a “Label” element in you Blogger blogs, it will show all your labels that you might add just for SEO. This can cause your blog looked unprofessional, especially to your blog readers. Wordpress have two ways to organize their articles, using Categories and Tags. With that you could group your articles into their relevant categories and made more specific grouping using tags. Wordpress way of posts organization made it bested Blogger in this term.

Javascript
Blogger gives their users freedom in putting javascript codes in their Blogger blog. While Wordpress.com prohibit their users to put javascript codes such as Google Adsense code on their Wordpress.com blogs. This restriction in one of several reasons why online money maker prefers Blogger as their dollars “hunting ground”.

File Upload
Wordpress support more file to be uploaded like document and image files. While Blogger only let you upload images.

Statistics
Wordpress already provides a built-in statistic to rate your blog performance and Blogger do not. Of course, this is not such a problem since you could put a third party tracker in your Blogger blogs.

There are still several minor things that differs this two blog platforms, however, I think that 6 factors stated above was the things we should look upon. If you only want a blog that gives you simplicity and flexibility without having to worry about hosting, bandwidth etc, I would recommend Blogger as your blog hosting place. Of course if in the future you were planning to have your own blog domain and hosting, I would recommend Wordpress to make you adapted to their platform.

Good luck on Blogging, I hope this Blogger-Wordpress comparation articles can help you decides what platform that would be best for you. And if there are anything you feel that it needs to be added, feel free to add in on the comment section.