Trying to save you from making my mistakes.
This is my FIRST post on WordPress.org and I am pretty excited. At the end of last year I started my blog using WordPress.com (very important to see the .com detail). After pressing a bunch of buttons, trying to figure how it all worked, I gave up after the first post “Hello world”. I let it sit for a while unused, feeling a little overwhelmed by the complicated process. A few months went by and I had another burst of energy after seeing my photographer friend Jeff Hawe’s blog. Simple, clean, I liked it immediately. Shortly after seeing the blog I emailed Jeff asking him.
“What do you use for your blog?”. He replied “Blogger, it’s easy to use and free” “Easy to use” is all I wanted to hear at that moment.
Now that I learned more about Blogger, easy to use and free would be the only reasons I would use it. I signed up with Blogger and within hours I was up and running with my new beautiful blog that looked just like Jeff’s but I guess that’s what you get with a free service. Everything seemed perfect and I started happily blogging away. Months went by and I quickly realized the limitation of my new dreamy blog. The slick dynamic template that I was using didn’t allow basic functions like sharing the posts with facebook or adding specific widgets. They gave you the option of sharing with Google+ but not Facebook. Does anyone use Google + anyway? Blogger is owned by Google, they prefer shooting themselves on the foot and loosing users t
han giving the share with facebook option on Blogger. I spent days going over the net trying to figure out ways to crack the code to get what I needed and started learning more and more about the limitations you have with blogger. I realized that to have the share options I wanted, I had to change template and crack some more code AND, AND, AND. Weeks went by, my brain was smoking, my success was limited and I started reading about Worldpress.org. Finally a Blogger Guru from India named YOGA and a super nice guy who specializes on Blogger Dynamic template emailed me through his blog to let me know that what I wanted to do was not possible with Blogger. Thanks to YOGA I realized it was time to make the move to Worlpress.org.
What is WordPress.org? In a nutshell WordPress.org is a stripped down version of WordPress.com but it allows you to download to a server the software to host your own blog (with a web hosting provider). WordPress.com initially might be a free service but in truth, as your blog grows, it will end up costing you (for upgrades and space). In the end it can become an expensive proposition, much more expensive than paying a few dollars a month for hosting. I will not lie to you, Worldpress.org is NOT user friendly, I am learning it as we speak. It might be worth hiring someone to help you set up the basics, I did (H&H Web). You can purchase design templates on the web, plugins for pretty much anything you need (not available with WordPress.com), from share options to functions. If you really want to go all out you can have someone design your blog from scratch as customized as you want it.
The main reasons I decided to ultimately switch to WordPress.org is that I wanted to have control over my blog and know that years down the road someone didn’t decide to shut down a service that I have thousand of posts on. I wanted to be able to back up my blog and know that I have it in my pocket and it will be there as long as my old fingers will be able to type. I wanted a service that gave me the unlimited options of customization that I might need as my blog grows. I didn’t want the limitations of Blogger and their idiotic attitude towards facebook and I didn’t want to eventually pay for upgrades with WordPress.com and again the limitation with plugins.
Hope this blog helps you understand the basic reasons why I recommend starting a blog with WordPress.org and not waste time making the mistakes I made. If you want to find out more about the differences between the three blogging engines read the posts I included down below, they are very good reads. If you liked this blog please like my facebook page and share this post.
To know more about differences between WordPress.org VS Blogger this is a very good post that goes over the difference between the services (Including WordPress.org) and the author, even though he is a wordPress.org user, was very analytic and tried not to take sides (Blogger VS. WordPress.com: A Complete comparison).
To find out the differences between Worldpress.org VS Worldpress.com read this (Self Hosted WordPress.org vs. WorlPress.com)
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