The Web Wrangler

Thinking about starting a blog, but not sure where to start? If you’re new to the blogging game, this basic first step can be confusing. There are several blogging platforms available, both free and paid. To help you narrow it down, let’s take a look at the two most popular: Blogger and WordPress.com.

One of the web’s first dedicated blogging engines, Blogger was launched way back in 1999 by a rag-tag team of developers co-led by a young Evan Williams, who these days is better known as the CEO of Twitter. Just a few years after taking the web by storm, Blogger was bought out by Google, and has since grown from a simple publishing tool into a blog hosting and publishing giant. As of earlier this year, you can no longer use Blogger to publish a blog to your own hosted domain — Blogger blogs must be hosted on Blogspot.com. However, Blogger does allow users to set their own domains up on Blogspot. This means you can have a Blogger blog at www.yourdomain.com instead of being stuck with yourblogname.blogspot.com.

Blogger is probably best known for its simplicity. Someone who’s completely new to blogging can have their own blog up and running and start posting in a matter of minutes. For the average user they offer drag-and-drop WYSIWYG page styling and point-and-click integration of “Gadgets,” little snippets of code geared toward specific functionality that fit neatly into the sidebar. Recently, Blogger has made a lot of strides toward catching up with its competitors by updating and expanding their template selection and integrating static page functionality, which makes it possible to have not just a blog, but an entire web site, hosted by and published on Blogspot, free of charge.  But what sets Blogger apart is that you’re not limited to using their templates. They allow total CSS and HTML customization, which gives you total control over the look and feel of your blog. And if you’re not a designer but still want better template options than Blogger provides, you can find tons of free templates and customization options at sites like BTemplates or Cutest Blog On the Block.

Other advantages of Blogger include the option to monetize your blog with easy integration of Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate links, easy community-building with a Google Friend Connect gadget, and the ability to completely remove Blogger branding from your blog’s design.

WordPress.com is a blog hosting & publishing platform, established in 2005, that runs on the WordPress content management system (CMS). The CMS itself is free and open source and can be found at WordPress.org, but as it requires you to have your own web host and a modicum of technical know-how to install, this article will focus on the hosting platform. Like Blogger/Blogspot, setting up a blog on WordPress.com is pretty quick and simple. Also as with Blogger, users can have their own domains instead of being stuck with a WordPress.com URL. Like Blogger’s gadgets, WordPress’s sidebar widgets can be added or removed via simple drag-and-drop.

WordPress.com offers a much larger variety of templates, or “themes,”  that can be installed with the click of a mouse. However, unlike Blogger, the free version of WordPress.com allows only minimal theme customization, and you are limited to the selection in their theme library. Another drawback is that their free version is occasionally supported by the appearance of Google Adsense ads over which the user has no control (unlike Blogger, where you not only control whether to display ads on your blog, but you also receive a percentage of the proceeds), and you’re also stuck with WordPress branding in the form of a footer link and a browser shortcut icon. They do, however, offer paid and VIP accounts that offer more customization options without the ads or enforced branding.

Where WordPress.com wins is in greater functionality. The WordPress CMS is a powerful blogging platform, and WordPress.com integrates several standard WordPress plug-ins that make the blogging experience even better, such as the Akismet comment spam filter.

The Verdict: Like most things in life, it comes down to priorities. If you want a lot of behind-the-scenes functionality and don’t mind a cookie-cutter theme that isn’t unique to your blog, WordPress.com is probably the platform for you. If, however, you want an easy-to-use blog or simple web site with a look and brand that is uniquely yours without having to worry about hosting fees, Blogger is the hands-down winner.