I’ve had a blog here, and another one over at Blogspot for a year now, and so of course I have an opinion about which platform I prefer.
Comparison:
1. Both are free, and both are easy to set up and easy to use.
Contrast:
1. WordPress lets you add static pages, and with some themes you can even switch the order of the static pages and your blog, so that you can create a proper website. Blogger has no such thing.
2. WordPress has more themes, but you cannot edit the stlye sheets or the HTML of your theme. Blogger is more limited in its ready-made templates, but you can choose from many, many templates to download from other sites, and you can edit any of the ready-made to your heart’s content, provided you know how, of course. This makes BLogger more versatile for the tech-savvy. (I’m currently learning HTML and CSS, and so at some future time, I’ll want to experiment with my other blog. Expect chaos to ensue.)
3. WordPress has a built-in stat counter. Blogger invites you to add your own, which I have done. This is how I know that one blog is being read and one is not, though that’s due to the content being different.
4. Blogger allows you to use AdSense in order to make some money. However, you must have a lot of hits in order for this to work for you. WordPress does not allow you to monetize your blog.
5. In addition to categories, WordPress has tags which you can add to your posts. This allows tag-surfing through other WordPress blogs, which allows you to find a lot of WordPress bloggers with similar interests. It builds communities. Blogger lacks this feature.
6. People have wondered in the past whether Google favors its own product in its search engine. It seems to me that it does not.
My verdict?
I prefer WordPress because it has more of the features that I personally like and use. I can see, however, that others might prefer Blogger for its CSS-editing and money-making possibilities. It’s my intention to keep both blogs active, and to maintain a presence on both platforms.
As a experiment, I’ve put up the same post on both blogs. I’m curious to see which will get more hits today.
I personally also like WordPress better for a more professional kind of blog. I like the built in counter and the blog stats that tell you what search engine terms people have used, etc. I also like having the static post at the beginning so that anyone who comes to any of your posts can get a general message.
However, I love blogger for my personal family kinds of pages. For me, they are more scrapbook or journal -ish and I like to find fun backgrounds and stuff.
Still, for a professional look that functions a lot like a web page, I totally love wordpress.
Another difference: Blogger allows Javascript, which makes it easier to display widgets from social blogrolling sites like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. I like to use them to visit the blogs of those who visit my blog, and also, people who visit blogs I find interesting may themselves have interesting blogs.
They do work in WordPress, but the MyBlogLog one in particular is clunky and often displays the wrong pictures.
I just recently wrote a blog about this as well. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned much that’s not already here, but here it is:
http://brycewordsfromjapan.blogspot.com/2009/07/seeing-as-how-i-am-not-in-japan-yet-i.html
Hello Sir/Madam
I too like wordpress very much. As, I am a software developer, i have created some of the websites using html, css, php, javascript. I am also interested about blogs. As I am new here in the field of Blog and else. So, I dont know how and where to create my Blog. So I am not able to create my own posts or site like writting as u have. I dont know even the process how to create here. Though I have created some site with wordpress but never blogged like this as u have. Your writting discovers that wordpress is useful and it has so many features to help bloggers that is really a good information. It is my opinion if you had written about where and how to do it and what is the procedure then it would have been more useful and increased more interest for ur readers.