I have now wasted about a good hour playing around with a new blog set up with Blogger, one of the most popular free blog programs around. While many are singing the praises of WordPress, I have found that for a newbie such as myself with minimal html experience, Blogger is a decent choice. You can check out my little blog here.
Here’s my tier of comparison with some of the major blog programs out there, including Typepad, WordPress, and Blogger.
Free
Wordpress
Blogger
Perfect for beginners
1. Typepad: you have to pay a few bucks a month, but nobody makes it easier to put a nice looking blog together.
2. WordPress: a close second. There’s a little less versitility in the templates and you need to know some basic html to post book lists and other images to your link lists.
3. Blogger: I was surprised to see how many people use Blogger and still Blogger does not have an optional interface for posting links. While they make it easy to write up the html yourself, I would think that it’s fairly easy to make two ways of adding links such as wordpress.
Free and Versatile
Blogger: while wordpress gives you quite a bit for free and Typepad will give you all the features you could want if you’re willing to shell out $15 a month, Blogger lets you customize their templates completely. My Blogger site has been revamped in some major ways and I have yet to exhaust the options. You need to know how html colors work and have additional html knowledge, but they make it as easy as they can.
If I Had Only One Blog . . .
If I had only one blog, I would probably host it with Yahoo and then run it on wordpress. I use wordpress on this site and find that I can easily edit the format of the blog while using simple features to add links and other content to the site. It is the best of both worlds.
The pro plan for Typepad is nice, but it doesn’t quite compare in my book. I think that Typepad has a sharp blog product that is easy and fun to use, but who wants to pay so much when you can get a bunch more with wordpress. Perhaps it’s a draw, but I have to put my money on wordpress for now.
Blogger is fun to use if you want a free blog that can be fully customized, but you have to know quite a bit of html in order to make it of much use.
Ed Cyzewski: Author // Contemplative 