On Wednesday I posed a simple question on my Blogger blog: Do you prefer WordPress or Blogger and why?
This question fell upon the deaf ears of my readership. I can’t be too surprised that my post elicited no comments. I asked the wrong audience. My readership is dominated by friends who either don’t blog or have no frame of reference. The majority of my blogging friends use Blogger. Though I’ve never done a formal survey on why that is, I’ll assume it was for reasons similar to my own: when Googling “blog” or “free blog” Blogger is the first result.
[For those of you who don't know Blogger is a free blogging service, offered by Google. WordPress, another free service, is not affiliated with Google.]
But when I asked the same question on Twitter, it garnered all sorts of feedback. All but one somewhat neutral response (“it depends but WordPress is the more flexible of the platforms”) were enthusiastically in favor of WordPress.
Here are a few thoughts that respondents Tweeted:
I also received a few direct messages on the subject. Over and over again, Tweeple sung the praises of WordPress’s functionality, cleaner interface, better aesthetics, and more professional template options. It also seemed to be the preference of those with a little more web savvy or interest in HTML or CSS, traits I’d associate more with those I follow/am followed by on Twitter than my friends who read my site.
The overwhelming feedback from my Twitter followers was more than enough for me to pursue the switchover. Thankfully I had snagged the sportskate.wordpress.com URL a few months ago out of curiosity, so I didn’t have to worry about the address already being snatched up. In the past few days I found a helpful link that allowed me to bring most of my content from Blogger to WordPress rather painlessly. I was able to transfer all of my posts, drafts, comments, and pictures with relative ease, but am still in the process of updating/reloading YouTube and Hulu clips and fixing internal links to other posts within my blog.
Even though I was pretty cranky at first about losing some attributes I loved about my old blog (the way the opening picture looks against the green background, for example), I’ve really started to come around in the past two days. Even though I had to crop the picture I so dearly loved on the old blog, I think it still works. And I love the clean and simple new layout of the WordPress template. There’s a whole lot more I’d like to do with this site, but I think it’s well on its way.
Here are my blog’s before and after headshots:
What a difference a few hours make!
What are your thoughts on these two blogging sites? I look forward to your comments.
