Blogspot vs WordPress

First! Err… well, this is my genuine first post so forgive the corny opening. If you have read the “About this blog” page, you may have seen that these are my first steps into the blogging space. So, what better subject for a first article than the usability of blogging sites? First off, I decided that self hosted blogging or setting up my own website is not what I am looking for at this moment (I do not have the time), perhaps later. Secondly, I looked at the sites that offer a free blogging environment and after some experiments decided to go with either Blogspot.com (i.e. Google’s Blogger platform) or with WordPress.com (featuring the WordPress platform). There are already enough Blogger vs WordPress articles to be found (comparing features), but here is my take:

Figure 1: WordPress dashboard

WordPress is simple, beautiful and clear to use. Just create an account on WordPress.com, select a theme and you are good to go. The interface is clear and straightforward so within a few hours you feel at home, even if you know very little about web sites and programming. The only thing that strikes me as a bit odd is that the theme you select not only influences the style of your blog, but also the functionality (for example, a theme can support ‘sticky posts’ while others may not and you lose that functionality in your blog when you switch themes). However, there is one big but…. If you want to customize your blog (and don’t want to pay) you are out of luck. You cannot change the look and feel of your blog very much, though with some themes you can change a background color or header image. For further changes to the look of your blog you can buy the ‘Custom CSS’ package ($14.97 a year) which lets you modify the styles sheets of themes that support it so you can tweak a theme a bit more. There are currently 97 themes to choose from, so without this package you will not have a very unique looking blog as all the blogs on WordPress.com are based on one of those 97 themes. Another thing is that running own scripts/widgets is not possible, so again you are restricted to what WordPress.com offers. I wanted a bit more freedom, so I decided to give Blogger a go too.

Blogger seems to be the complete opposite of WordPress to me. There is ultimate freedom: you can use a set of pre-defined themes (Blogger calls them templates), modify them (the CSS) as you like, download at template from a 3rd party and use/modify that, etc. This is the same with widgets (gadgets in Blogger speak): you can use the gadgets that Blogger supplies or download some and use those. So the choice is easy, right? Must be Blogger? Well not so fast Ken!

The user interface of Blogger is a mess! For example: You start in a ‘Dashboard’; a single fixed width column page in which you can’t do many useful things. So let’s quickly continue with one of the Edit Post/Settings/Design links. All take you to a (variable width page) framework in which you can design your blog and add articles. As example, we’ll have a look at the ‘Design’ tab (click the pictures to enlarge):

Figure 2: Blogger Design->Page Elements

Figure 3: Blogger Design->Edit Html

Figure 2 is the ‘Page Elements’ sub-tab in which you can add widgets to your page. Nice. Figure 3 shows the ‘Edit Html’ sub-tab. You can change the CSS of your theme and preview how that would look. Also nice.

The third sub-tab link on the design tab is the ‘Template Designer’ link. Click this and you will be surprised! Yes, the link has a New! label stuck behind it, and apparently this is Google speak for “not quite consistently integrated yet”. Pressing the link opens a designer page that does not match any of the other pages. Look at this:

Figure 4: Blogger Design->Template Designer (1)

Figure 5: Blogger Design->Template Designer (2)

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

• The styling (fonts, colors, etc) of the template designer is completely different to the rest of the tabs (that’s fairly obvious if you look at the pictures). It looks like a totally different project that just has been slapped into the blog editor without any consistency at all. I can appreciate how project teams within Google get time to experiment and come up with cool stuff, but integrating it when it is this inconsistent is just plain silly.
• The template designer takes over the whole page, removing the tabs you were so happily clicking to browse around options in the blog designer. You have to press the back button (several times) to get back to the Posting/Settings/Design/Monetize tab or press the ‘Back to Blogger’ link (whatdayamean? I am no longer in Blogger?) Nasty.
• The template designer gives you a very limited option of default templates (6 main templates with different color options compared to the 97 default themes in WordPress). But that is okay because you can download a theme from the internet and modify it here, right? Yes you can, but not in the template designer. You have to do that at the ‘Edit Html’ page and then go back to the designer. And for some parts (like setting column widths), the designer does not work if the template is not one of the default ones. Having said that, the designer itself is quite cool and playing around with other settings like font and background colors is nice because if gives you visual feedback immediately (Figure 4).
• The template designer has a page in which you can change the place of your gadgets on your blog page (Figure 5). Hey, we already had such a place, didn’t we? Yes we had (see Figure 2). But here in the template designer you cannot add gadgets (only move them around) while you can on Design/Page Elements. WTF?
• And then there is the ‘Old Templates’ stuff. Have a look at the Design->Edit Html page again (Figure 3). At the bottom there is support for “Old” Layout and Classic templates. Apparently there are even other sorts of templates which are incompatible with the designer. User (especially new ones) should not have to know these things, that’s why we have converter tools.

And there is much more stuff like this. For example, WordPress gives you statistics about how many people visited your blog right in your dashboard. Google does not. It requires you to create a ‘Google Analytics’ account and linked that to your blog. If you do, you have better statistics then you have in WordPress, but your just need to, eh… Google it to find out how to get it.

I wanted to have a bit more extensive commenting system and after some research is selected IntenseDebate. This could be nicely integrated with Blogger, but not with WordPress. You can’t install stuff on WordPress.com, remember? And there’s the possibility to earn some money with a Blogspot blog too! So, put up with the bad interface and still go for Blogspot?

Hard choice. I decided to go with Blogger and just bite my tongue about the interface. But then I could not find a decent looking template that worked (some templates you download are flawed) and got so fed up with all the time this was taking because of the bad user interface that I switched to WordPress again. So here we are! Maybe sometime in the future I will move to Blogspot again (because I do recognize it is far more flexible), but for my first blogging steps, WordPress it is!

See? Having a good user interface always wins!

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