What did I learn today ?

In the last week I have been setting up blogs for clients so I thought I’d share with you my views on WordPress vs Blogger based on my experiences this week. I must state these are just my opinions and I do have some previous experience with WordPress as this blog is my own self hosted WordPress blog-but until this week I had no experience with a blog hosted on wordpress or blogspot.
The basic requirements for the blogs were:

• very easy for the clients to use with the image upload built in and a wysiwyg editor for formatting and adding hyperlinks
• Quick for me to customise and brand including turning on and off options like blog rolls, comments etc
• For one client the ability to create pages as well as posts was a definate requirement

So you can see nothing fancy was required.

My first instinct was to go for WordPress but for the clients are on Windows servers and I didn’t feel like risking it turning into a drama trying to get php/MYSQL based WordPress installed on the Windows server so I wimped out of tht option and decided to research some Windows based blog software for these ones that could be installed within the clients hosting accounts. But again I wimped out and decided to take the quick and dirty option of externally hosted blogs.

Hence the WordPress vs Blogger options, my first option was to signup at WordPress.com but once I was in after being used to being able to change everything in my self hosted WordPress blog I suddenly felt very restricted. Also because I tend to modify my WordPress files on my own machine and then publish them up to the public server I didn’t like the new work flow so after an hour here I thought I’d give blogger (blogspot.com) a go.

Quicker than any of the the other options I had the first customer blog ready for the client to take over – this is probably because even though blogger has only a few templates to choose from one was a good match for the client site so I only need to upload the banner and turn off a few of the side options and we were in business.

Deal Direct Fashion Club web site

DealDirectFashionClub blog on blogger

The next 2 were relatively painless as well so for these clients blogger was definately the go.

foxybabes website

Foxybabes blog on blogger

For the client who definately needed “pages” as well as posts well blogger wasn’t the go and nor was using WordPress at WordPress.com for that matter but this is probably because I want to use the blog more as a CMS than a blog so a self hosted WordPress was definately the go here.

So what is the conclusion.

Well for the quick and dirty option where not alot of customisation is actually required then blogspot is the go but one problem I foresee is if the client ever wants to move their blog elsewhere then this is definately going to be a problem and if they decide they want alot more visual customisations then it is going to be a problem. I also tried the blogspot option of hosting some of the files on our own FTP server but even after following all the instructions and all the help documentation I couldn’t get it to work properly so these aspects could become “issues” in the future.

self hosted blog being used as a CMS

For blogs where complete visual control is required, the option to customise absolutely everything is neccessary and you want to use it as a quick and dirty Content Managment System then I can’t go past WordPress sure you need to use alot of plugins to get it the way you want but the fact that there are so many plugins avialable is a definate strength not to mention the available themes and support community.