January 16, 2010

Grrrr...

Hmm, I've just spent the last huge chunk of time trying to set up a wordpress.com blog; I've seen some great ones which seem to offer a lot more than blogger does. Is there anyone out there who has used both? Which do you prefer? Wordpress seems to have a huge learning curve. What do you think?

5 comments:

Breigh said...

I don't think you will get anything out of Wordpress.com that you aren't getting from blogger. They are both basically the same in how they work and what they allow you to do. A lot of wordpress blogs that have the really cool plugins with templates that have been tweaked a lot are blogs that the people host themselves.

My husband has a blog on Wordpress.com and I have friends on Blogger, they both complain about the same limitations.

Tara Muise said...

what are you using? i really like the site...

Breigh said...

I use wordpress but not on wordpress.com, I host it myself. There are 2 versions of wordpress you can use. You can use it on wordpress.com where they host it for you, but you are very limited (like with blogger) in regards to what you can do with it. Only things they have supported themselves can be put on your blog (themes, widgets, whatever). The other is the wordpress platform itself that you host on your own database / domain. This gives you free range to make any changes you like. You can totally tweak the theme, use any plugins or widgets you like, etc. This requires a certain amount of knowledge of css or php but I had none going in and learned what I know by trial and error. If you are comfortable playing around with code then you can pick it up easily enough.

Tara Muise said...

cool! thanks!

Megan said...

It totally depends on what you want to do. I used Blogger for the first few years, and I was comfortable over there, but I'm now self-hosted on Wordpress. I think I probably don't need to be, but I wanted a new look and I wanted my own URL. I could have done both of those things on Blogger if I'd really wanted to, but I figured that I'd check out Wordpress.

There are all sorts of things you can do with the template and still be on Blogger if you really want to. This one is a pretty standard one. Do a Google search for "Blogger templates" and you might find one you really like. My nine-year-old found his template that way, and that's also what I did for the Best NWT Blogs site. If you can't find one that's perfect, you can hire a designer, which is what I ended up doing over at Snow-Covered Hills.