Blogger vs Wordpress - The Search for the Best Blogging Platform - Part 5 - Conclusion

A lot of discussion and myth-busting happened in the previous posts where I tried to impart to you what makes Blogger secretly great. In this post, we are going to wind down and try to answer some final questions.

I believe that Blogger, while quite popular, still does not have the attention and prestige that it truly deserves. It has been downplayed as simply for beginners that will soon be outgrown by them. This is partly due to the misconceptions surrounding Blogger which I hope have been cleared by now.

Bloggers give the impression that no pros should take it seriously; they then enumerate its disadvantages. The problem is, these disadvantages really applies only to hosted platforms in general and does not apply to Blogger most of the time. If you care to learn (X)HTML, CSS, and Blogger's custom tags (Page Element, Fonts and Colors, Widget Template), it could be profitably used even by the pros. To support that position, I enumerated the usual advantages of hosted platforms, that Blogger is, including the not so obvious ones. To round it up, I sought to shed some light on the misconceptions surrounding Blogger's weaknesses.

By confirming the advantages of Blogger and challenging the alleged disadvantages, I wanted to show that Blogger is the way to go except in a small number of circumstances. That last statement recognizes that while I believe in Blogger's capability, other platforms might fit some users better. That answers one of the final questions namely: if Blogger is so great, should everybody be using it?

There are other questions. I would also like to explore with you the users who are better served with the software generally considered by many as the most powerful self–installed software the blogging world has ever known. I'd never put in issue the power and flexibility of Wordpress. That's a given. But sometimes, you simply don't need that power and flexibility specially when the price you have to pay in terms of complexity is high.

Taking into consideration the capabilities of Blogger and the complexity of Wordpress, I think that the only people who will be best served with the latter are those who need to do something on the server–side of things such as PHP, MySQL or ASP and other server–side programming or those who need or want to tinker with the code of the platform (Wordpress) itself. Those who are in the job market for a web developer or webmaster position would also find it beneficial to have such an installation to showcase their relevant skills like a portfolio of sorts.

Some who are into blogging but mainly want to connect with their friends and acquaintances are better served with hosted platforms with a social network slant such as LiveJournal. For those who would like a beautiful ready made template but does not care to edit their template code because for them HTML elements look like gunk, then Wordpress.com won’t be a bad idea even if it doesn't allow HTML editing in the free service.

But for everyone else, there is Blogger.