Blogger vs. Wordpress, which one is better?

As many of you know, I'm currently in the process of getting my own blog, thebigklosowski.com, up and running. It's what you are reading now in case you don't know where you are, and if that's the case I'm not sure this article is for you.

Although I co-own Krescendo, web design and hosting company, I was not interested in hosting my own blog. The complications of security and updates throughout the life of such an endeavor is daunting. So I've been evaluating free third party services, primarily Wordpress and Blogger, to serve as my blog's launching point.

I didn't want to officially start The Big Klosowski blog until I had figured out which platform worked best for me. No sense in pouring your heart out out to dozens (if I'm lucky) of readers unless you know where your work is going to reside.

Since you are reading this as a Blogger based blog, I guess I should explain my decision.

Ease of Use: Blogger

Both Blogger and Wordpress are extremely easy to use. For a blogging newbie like me, I could get up and running a blog in minutes on either site, including customizing my theme and starting my first post. I actually like Wordpress' posting process better, as it seems the more refined of the two.

Embedding an inline photo, video, or music easy with both services. However, there are some major drawbacks with emeddable media on Wordpress.

Wordpress is very choosy when it comes to embeddable media. It does not allow Flash and Shockwave, used by many of the embedded video players from popular sites like Vimeo and Fliqz. Anything beyond Wordpress' supported formats, and Wordpress' editor strips the code from your blog post. This is too limiting in a world where the majority of video content I want to share does not come from sites like YouTube or Facebook. This proved to be a major challenge for me.

Blogger allows me to embed almost anything in a post, as long as it's valid HTML. That provides me with the flexibility I need to embed and share video files, games, and even some specific audio podcasts that I find important.

Uploading and sharing an image gallery of photos is also very difficult with Wordpress. Wordpress will not allow you to embed a third-party slideshow in your blog. I have projects where we use Flickr or Picasa web albums full of captions to narrate an event. Wordpress' strict embedding policy made these galleries unusable. As a result, in order to share, I had to re-upload, re-organize, and re-caption the photos. This is time consuming and a duplication of effort. It's made more time consuming because I can't embed a Wordpress gallery elsewhere, like I could with a Picasa gallery.

So in the usability category, while both perform equally well for posting text and a few images, Wordpress stumbles when allowing embedded content. Since sharing and distribution of content is a vital part of the Web 2.0 experience, I find this to be an insurmountable workflow obstacle for me.

Updates from an iPhone: Wordpress.com

One of my goals in setting up a blog, is the ability to let people know what's on my mind from any place I might be, at any time. It's a good way to pass the time, and also an important way to disseminate information, such as during the upcoming DNC in Denver.

There are several ways to update Blogger and Wordpress from an iPhone.

With Blogger you can either login with the Safari browser to edit your blog. I find it slow and cumbersome to do it this way.

What is easier is to send an email and picture to a Blogger email address that will automagically post your picture and thoughts directly to the blog. This is simple enough, but the blog posts come through with line breaks from the iPhone Mail program and the resulting post looks terrible. Additionally, it is very hard to edit a post should you realize that you have misspelled something basic.

This makes mobile updates with the iPhone to Blogger more difficult than they should be. There are third party apps for the iPhone, like LifeCast, which make posting new blogs much easier. However, they only allow one photo to be added to any given post, the same as with the email method. Also, the program does not allow you to edit previous blog posts that weren't made with the LifeCast app. This is very frustrating.

Wordpress on the other hand is an open-source program that can be installed on any server worldwide for free. As a result, they have also open-sourced a native iPhone app that allows for near complete management of photos and posts in your Wordpress blog. This program works even for hosted blogs, as long as they are relatively up to date. The native app makes posting to Wordpress effortless, although links are still a bit tricky. Clearly this is where Wordpress has the edge.

Aestethics: Wordpress.com

Both services come with a wide variety of customization options and available templates. In my opinion, Wordpress offers more templates with more sophisticated design elements than Blogger.

Additionally, Wordpress makes it much more easier to customize the templates than Blogger does. While both allow you to pick template colors easily enough, that's where ease of use differs. To change your header image with Blogger you have to link to an externally hosted image by manually editing the HTML of a template. In contrast, Wordpress will give you the dimensions of the image, and allows you to upload an image to quickly customize the template without editing the HTML or externally hosting an image. It's a word of difference.

Search Engine Optimization: Tie

I find both services are spidered by Google very quickly, and your content is available in search results within an hour of posting in most cases. I do find that Wordpress blogs tend to show up in my Google Alerts before my Blogger posts. However, each service does very well in this respect.

Customization: Blogger.com

I find that when creating a blog, I want the site to be functional in all of the ways that I want to publish information. While evaluating both platforms, I noticed that each had "widgets" that could be installed on your blog.

Wordpress will give you 10-20 pre-built widgets, many of which can only be used once. There are additional widgets that you can pay to use, but since my goal was to use a free service, this did not appeal to me. Wordpress included the basics, like RSS readers and Calendars, but nothing fancy or awe inspiring.

Blogger on the other hand allows you to choose from hundreds of freely available Widgets that they have been developing for iGoogle for years. In addition, many of these are developed by third-party developers and do very specific things. That is good, and opens it up so that you could theoretically build your own widget to do exactly what you needed.

Widgets aren't just for play either. For example, setting up things like Google AdSense is much easier to do on Blogger. This is important if you want to generate revenue with your blog, and most bloggers do.

Both blog platforms will allow you to use your own domain as your address for no additional fee, as long as you own the domain. You can also choose to setup a blogger.com or wordpress.com subdomain if you do not own a domain name. These domains typically look like http://thebigklosowski.blogger.com. They will get you by initially, but if you plan to blog for any period of time, I'd suggest getting your own domain name, which typically run around $9 per year.

Conclusion: Blogger.com

Each platform clearly has it's strengths when it comes to providing a place to blog. Wordpress' open-source nature, easy of use on an iPhone, an visual superiority make it a strong contender.

However, when it comes down to brass tacks, Blogger's ease of customization and support for internet staples like embedded Adobe Shockwave and Adobe Flash objects make it the workhorse I need for my blog. Add in the easy integration of services like Google AdSense, Google Analytics, and Feedburner, and it becomes the clear solution for me. I'm still hoping that iPhone support will take off for Blogger, but for now I can work around it.