Climbing Moss

Last year we moved our blog from WordPress to Blogger and what a huge mistake that was. Now we are back but we thought we would point out why.

When we first decided to start a blog we looked around to see what blogging services there were out there.

We looked at Tumblr, Squarespace, Weebly and Wix but it came down to the two main ones, which were WordPress and Blogger. Seemingly there is a huge debate on which one is better than the other.

We started on WordPress, but as beginners we found it difficult to navigate and when it came to trying to put the slideshow for the Top 100 Men and Women, we hit a bit of a wall. So we moved over to blogger and continued there.

Given that we have used both we thought we would weigh in and point out our pros and cons of each…

Just for reference, currently we are on the free plan, so keep that in mind.

---

Pros

• Google Adsense
• Easy for a beginner.
• Simple formats.
• Widgets were pre-made.
• If you have a Gmail you already have the option for a blogger.
• Good for diaries and journaling.

Cons

• Easy to hack.
• Comments, including spam are published directly, without screening.
• Impossible to move your posts, without doing it individually (Which I did)
• When moving posts individually, you realize that blogger adds a frame in random places in the post, which you cannot remove.
• The font and headers and pretty much any text does whatever it wants despite setting it before saving. ( You will have massive text and tiny text all in one sentence)
• Images get removed without warning.
• Hard to customize.
• Hard to gain followers and Hard to see if anyone had viewed the blog.
• Pages were hard to set up and link to.
• No real support from google.
• Once you upload a picture, google then owns the copyright.
• You can’t put a link in a post until you have published it, then you have to go back and edit it.
• Hard to edit html or adjust the pre-made formatting.
• Stats are vague (Someone viewed your post somewhere in Asia)
• If you view your own blog it counts as a public view and normally gets the location wrong anyway.
• Adding locations to posts is easy, however the view the locations on the map and it will be miles off .
• There is no separation between categories and tags.
• Social Media was really hard to set up.

 

---

Pros

• There are many free and paid for themes.
• The themes are far more responsive.
• There are a lot of widgets.
• Its very easy to adjust your blog to incorporate what you need.
• Posting is easier and tidier, with the categories and tags.
• Linking Social media is done with just a click of a button.
• You can post straight onto the blog and onto the social media all at the same time.
• Comments are easy to screen before publishing.
• Security verification.

Cons

• There is a restriction on how much media you can save.
• Importing slideshows from other websites is problematic.
• Importing Video and Audio is not available for free plans, at all.
• There are limitations to the free plans.
• You cannot direct the domain name to the site and display climbingmoss.co.uk instead it changes to climbingmoss.wordpress.com

 

---

In conclusion, having now used both WordPress and Blogger and having got used to the whole blogging world. We may have learnt to navigate WordPress better than we used to, maybe that has something to do with it. However, based on our Pros and Cons, WordPress seems to be winning and we are back here, where we began, this time hopefully for good.

So what are your opinions on the two?

If you like  the new look blog, we would love to hear from you, please click the follow button and comment and come back for a new post every Thursday.