Once you decide you want to start a blog and know that you will have enough time to keep up a blog, you have to decide how you want to set up your blog.  Blogger and Wordpress are free content management systems that make blogging easy.  There are pros and cons to each.  I have received this question in the past, so thought I would share a little bit of what I know with all of you.

Google Blogger is great for anyone that doesn’t know too much about website design and administration.   Google Blogger will host everything for you, including a website address.  If you visit a number of review and giveaway sites, you will notice that some have the .blogspot.com in the URL, these are websites that are on Blogger and provided by Google.  Although I do see more and more people who are using blogger purchase their own domain name.

Because Google Blogger is run by Google, your reviews and posts are subject to Google.  When Google has problems – you will have problems.  Many people have had posts disappear. It takes a long time to write product reviews and it would be very upsetting to write a 1000 word post only to find out it got lost in the blogosphere when trying to save it.

On the other hand, Google Blogger is very easy to work with.  You can easily set up your front page layout and do not need any website experience.  It’s as simple as dragging and dropping.

Wordpress is for someone who has a little bit of tech knowledge.  There are “plugins” that allow you to create the page exactly the way that you want, but you have to know how to install the plugins and then set up the pages the way you want as well.  You can find a theme, install it and customize it the way you want.  There is a little bit more or a learning curve to work with Wordpress.   Also, if you are planning on using Wordpress, you will need to have your own web hosting and domain name to get the full benefit of Wordpress.

I have to admit, although I use Wordpress for my blog, I did not design my website at all.  My site is completely designed and maintained by my husband.  I am constantly asking him to update “this and that”, and thankfully he can do it all.  If i had a web designer, I would be broke paying for all the changes.  Some of the plugins I have on my site are the ads manager, which you see on the right hand side, and the new categorized layout I recently added to my blog.

These are just a few of the differences between Blogger and Wordpress, please add some of your experiences in the comments below.