Why I chose Blogger over WordPress and other blogging tools

Blogger vs WordPress vs the alternatives: The reasoning behind my choice of Blogger from Google as the platform behind MoonKlash Blog rather than the many alternatives such as WordPress.

Whilst some people may argue, WordPress is considered by many to be the best blog tool available freely on the net, and for a good number of reasons:

• You can install it in your web space and customise it;
• You can use any template;
• There is a great selection of plugins available;
• With certain tweaks it's easy to ensure you blogs are fully optimised in a way that search engines will like;
• You retain ownership of your entries, whilst other blogging tools such as Googles offering can claim your content as their own.
• Many, many more reasons which deserve an article of their own.

Whilst all of the above is true, this does rather assume you will be running your own installation of WordPress (downloaded from http://www.wordpress.org) rather than using the hosted version (available from http://www.wordpress.com). And if installing your own copy, you need to have access to PHP web space and a database.

Rather regrettably, my web hosting package is limited to basic HTML only. Yes, I know that's not all that great, but I pay an excellent price for this (nothing with no advertising). Rather than swap my website showcasing my digital creative media projects for a rushed replacement and actually start paying out my hard earned cash, I've decided to go for a full redesign later in the year and migrate to WordPress then.

"What about the hosted version of WordPress?"

Most of the WordPress advantages I've listed above are applicable only when installing the downloadable version of WordPress within your web space. If you use the free hosted service from www.wordpress.com, you are limited in the templates you can use, the plugins you can add, and a lot more.

"Doesn't your web hosting company offer a blog tool you can incorporate into your web space?"

It does indeed, and for the thirty seconds I tried it I have to admit it looked great having my blog integrated into my proper website. Then I sighed and deleted the code. Why? My web host loads my blog into my page by using a client-side javascript include. From an SEO standpoint this is useless: spiders won't see the blog because it doesn't exist within the page fetched from the server, it will only appear in your web browser. Blog entries will never be indexed on my domain and won't show up in the SERPS. Placing my blog on a subdomain means at least they will be found and will use my domain name. I can always carefully redirect my subdomain when I move my blog to its new location.

"There are other blogging tools available"

There are, and I briefly looked into these but Blogger won me over because it allows me to set it up using moonklash.com, because I can use my own templates, and because there are a nice selection of other features I like. For now Blogger fulfils my blogging needs and is the winner, however as time goes by this will be something I review.

I plan to follow this entry up later in the year when I start shopping around for a different web host, and I'll also be offering further analysis into the blogging tools that are out there on the world wide web. Follow me on twitter if you'd like to be alerted when I revisit this topic later in the year!