Blogger or WordPress – How to create a blog and get started

You have probably decided to get started with blogging, which is why you are here. As you will start to explore the world of blogging, this is a basic question about what platform to choose – Blogger or WordPress? And how to create a blog and get started.

Blog Trumpet is a one-stop shop and solution for all your blogging questions and requirements. You might be wanting to get started as a text-rich content blogger to express yourself, and sell your expertise commercially. Or you might be already established as a brand and having a message for the internet community. Below, I have summarised what are the pros and cons of choosing either WordPress or Blogger, and why you should choose one over the other.

Blogger

Blogger is owned by Google, which means you can get started with Blogger using a Google account, and you can hope to find a lot of features inside Blogger that you already use or might like to use as a Google user. Blogger was started in 1999 and was one of the most user-friendly interfaces for bloggers. Because it sooned gained a lot in popularity, it was purchased by Google and since then has been with Google.

Pros

Among the pros of using Blogger is that it is free. Although, you can opt-in for additional features that are paid, you get a lot of bells and whistles as free features in the shape of widgets and templates. The site offers great flexibility for rookie bloggers to get started, and add a lot of professional features easily to the site that they would like to use. Many Google features such as AdSense and Analytics are very easy to integrate using Blogger.

Cons

Among the constraints that Blogger puts up, is that most of the features that are offered in the platform, are only what Google bothers to offer you. Which means, that although blogging could have evolved with more and new exciting features otherwise, Blogger may still take time to offer that feature to you, until Google has perfected the algorithm for its own eco-system.

Apart from this, one of the major reasons for not choosing Blogger would be ownership. You must understand that whatever content you upload to a Blogger account, automatically becomes a part of the platform’s ownership. Although, you might have developed that content as your own intellectual property, Blogger does not allow you to take that content offline, in case they want to shut down the service. Your content remains at the mercy of Google, so long as they want to keep the Blogger service running.

WordPress

WordPress is an exciting platform for blogging, and our review of the features here will naturally make you feel that we are tipping the scales in its favour, given a choice among the two platforms. To introduce it to you, WordPress was forked from b2/cafelog with an initial release in 2003. From there is has grown considerably, and powering many websites today.

This makes us want to tell you, that many of the popular websites today, which refer to as bibles for a particular topic, especially travel and technology, actually started up as blogs. So when you’re getting started with blogging, and if you are determined to move forward, you can very well envision making your website really big. And it’s not difficult to say, that many of these popular websites are still running WordPress as their main engine behind their platforms.

Cons

Let us start with discussing a few of the difficulties that you may encounter if you’re getting started with WordPress. I must point out, that WordPress has two variants available – wordpress.com and wordpress.org. While either of these can serve beginner as well as advanced users, our focus here is to consider wordpress.org

WordPress is more complex to get started with blogging, especially because you need to download and host it off a server. You can get cheap WordPress hosting from a variety of hosts online, and a lot of help is available from a large community of developers, who will be happy to set it up for a fee.

Pros

One of the biggest reasons why I would advise WordPress is, that once you have set up your own hosting and blog, WordPress allows you to own your content. This means, that if WordPress ceases to provide service one day, you can still continue to host your downloaded version and take your content to any other hosting provider or domain name, without ownership issues. However, I will add here, that since WordPress is hugely supported by a very large community of developers, it is unlikely that the service will be stopped or will cease to exist.

Other features that make WordPress great, because it’s basically open-source, is that you have a wide variety of almost endless plugins and templates that make the platform really exciting to work with. Depending on how passionate you are about what you intend to make, you can actually hire help to make your platform absolutely unique with a custom-built design.

Assessing your needs

Both WordPress and Blogger are popular blogging platforms, whether you are just getting started, or an advanced user. While Blogger has not changed much since Google took it over, it is more popular if you want to create an online journal with a long chronology of blog posts or events. It is easy to set up with a Google account and you get a host of features to use with it, that you would normally with a Google account.

With WordPress however, you get a more vibrant content-management-system (CMS) which is more advanced and better developed, even though it was started after Blogger was launched. It requires a little more investment to get started, but goes a longer way into more serious blogging than Blogger. You will have the opportunity to adapt your blog and customise it to your tastes and preferences multiple times as you go along.

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