After just about a month of blogging on this site, I finally decided to make the change. I had gone as far as I could with Blogger, and it was time to move on to the greener pastures of Wordpress.
If you do any searches, Wordpress is kind of a no-brainer. In fact, some might wonder why I even bothered with Blogger in the first place. It doesn’t have anywhere near the power and customization of Wordpress. It’s a bit like using Microsoft Works instead of Office.
Why Did I Bother With Blogger?
In hindsight, if I had to make a suggestion to someone just starting out, I’d tell them to do the same thing I just did. I just might not recommend they do it in this short time frame. I’ve blogged before, on a much smaller scale in the past, and I’ve used both Blogger and Wordpress. There are a few things that Blogger offers that are well suited to the blogging novice.
Really simple setup
Easy integration with Adsense & other Google products
Nice clean set of templates
Large list of easy to install plug-ins
New beta version looks like it will give blogs a more “non-Blogger” look
Starting off with Wordpress, to me, is like giving a 5 year old a graphing calculator. Sure, they’ll be able to figure out how to add and subtract, but a lot of the functionality is wasted on them. If you’re like me, the first thing you do on any new program is go into the options, and see what everything does. Blogger is so simple, you can really just focus on writing, which is what you need to do when you’re getting started. Few people read the first 10 things you write, so getting good at writing in the beginning is a lot more important than the template and how many columns you have.
My writing still needs a lot of work. I’ve got just under 25 posts so far, but I felt it was time to make the move. If I’m going to get people to start reading this, I didn’t want it to look like a Blogger blog. Even having the custom domain from the beginning, the templates and the bar across the top just scream “new blogger”, which I think can turn people off sometimes.
I’m still in the middle of tweaking things here. I had to wait a day for the changes to take effect, so I could access the site again. It finally came back to life this morning. I’m going to try to leave the settings alone for a day or two, so I can get caught up on my writing. There are so many things to customize, it’s easy to forget about the content.
I’m glad I made the switch. I’m not super happy with the theme yet, but I might just leave it until I fork over the money for something custom. I’ve been looking at the Thesis theme, which looks great, but I don’t have the design and coding chops to really get my money’s worth. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how to make it look better.