Craig Harper and I were chatting via email and he asked some advice on if he should swap from Blogger to WordPress for his blog. Check out Craig’s site here.
I told him yes, because there are a range of benefits to WordPress over Blogger.
Then to drive my point home, Blogger has been down and not working for the past 3 days.
Funny how that happens.
Cheers
Thanks for the advice on WordPress Brendon. You are of course my number one source on all things internet marketing, blogging, seo etc. I’d like to ask a question that your readers may also find of interest. As you know on my site I have my blog ‘inserted’ into a template that I created. Is it possible to retain my own template and ‘insert’ the blog in this way in WordPress?
Hi Craig,
Yes, you can do that.
With blogger, as you would know, one creates a regular html page to serve as template, and puts special tags into it, like:
<Blogger>
<BlogDateHeader> <$BlogDateHeaderDate$> </BlogDateHeader>
</Blogger>
WordPress operates differently to achieve a similar goal.
You setup templates for wordpress which are more than just a single template – you have this whole package which tells wordpress what your homepage should look like, what a monthly archive should look like, what a page with comments should look like, etc etc.
You can employ a freelancer to do some funky wordpress templates, or if you wish, you can do so yourself. You’ll need to know a bit about HTML, CSS, PHP though.
If you’re prepared to give it a little effort, you’ll find you have a lot more control through the wordpress templating engine than blogger can offer.
Download a couple of templates from wordpress.org if you would like to get an idea of whats possible – then check the source code to see how its done.
Just wanted to say, and while I don’t doubt that there are certain advantages of using WordPress over Blogger… I use Blogger every single day, and it hasn’t missed a beat in quite some time… is there something I’m missing regarding your comment “Blogger has been down and not working for the past 3 days”??
Love your posts always, Brendon 🙂
Cheers!
Hi Japh
I love Blogger. I’ve used it for close on 4 years with very rarely a problem.
And I think, if it’s not broke don’t fix it. But we use WordPress a lot on other sites and it has a fair few advantages over Blogger.
But we’ll be sticking with blogger with this sites – it has served us well.
Cheers
Brendon