Blog Basics

(Mom, I promise that I’ll post silly pictures of the family soon. Very soon. Very, very soon. Maybe even today.)

Many blogging friends have asked me about my recent move to WordPress and why I left Blogger. And while I’m certainly not an expert, I thought it might be helpful to share the reasons that influenced my decision….

- First and foremost, I like the way WordPress blogs look. I know that sounds silly, but as I read and admire other blogs, the ones I liked the best were always WordPress blogs. Unfortunately, as an amateur blogger, I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out “how to do that” in Blogger, but always came up short. Which lead me to….

- I fell in love with the Thesis Theme when I watched this Demonstration (“Theme” in WordPress is the same thing as “Layout” in Blogger). The idea of being able to easily make all those customizations was incredibly appealing. Change the columns in one click? Add a sidebar? Move a sidebar? Navigation Bar in two minutes? Be still my heart. And now that I’ve been working with it for the last month I can honestly say that the $87 I spent on it was WORTH. EVERY. PENNY.

- WordPress does a great job “behind the scenes” helping search engines to find your blog. I have no idea how it works, but it does. For example, if someone entered “good true beautiful” into Google when I was publishing on Blogger, this blog came up about half way down the list. Now that I’m publishing on WordPress, this blog is first on the list. Try it, you’ll see. Snazzy, huh?

- WordPress has EXCELLENT support – in fact they are famous for it, and based on my experience I can see why. Honestly, I was getting frustrated by the lack of support from Blogger/Google. Being a DIY Blogger, I was trying to use Blogger’s support forums to get questions answered; and unfortunately, Blogger does a poor job answering questions. I would give their official support a D- (and that would be generous). Everything I learned about Blogger I had to hunt down and find on my own. And that was frustrating to me.

- I now own my blog completely. I own the domain name and I own the corner of the internet that is hosted on. And while it costs me a little bit (although not that much… see the next point) I like the fact that I have autonomy. If Blogger wigs out, or stops working with Internet Explorer, or has a system crash I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I like that.

- the hosting company that I was interested has some great discounts – including a promo code for a $100 discount on two years of hosting. That lowered the costs enough to make it a no brainer for me. (if you are interested in the discount code, just send me an email)

- I like some of the functionality of WordPress that Blogger doesn’t offer (these are called plugins and they are the extras you can add to your WordPress blog). For example, I can reply in the comment section and the commenter will get my email. That saves me a lot of time and makes it easier to answer questions. If you don’t know what I mean you can try it… just leave a comment below and I’ll reply to each one.

- along the same lines, WordPress does a very good job catching SPAM comments and getting rid of them. I was starting to get SPAM on my Blogger Blog (you know the guy from India who wants me to work from home?) and I didn’t want to have it get any worse. WordPress has some smart genius thing going on, because they catch SPAM like there’s no tomorrow. I like that.

- And finally, it seemed like every blogger I spoke with was recommending the move and their advice said “sooner rather than later.” Invariably, moving to WordPress is going to cause some disruption and it’s better to do that earlier in the life of your blog… And there’s no time like the present!

So there you go, my almost comprehensive list of why I made the change.

Tagged as: Blog Basics

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