Friday, June 20, 2008

Blogging Platform Review: Blogger (UPDATED 2015)

The first blogging platform that I will review is the platform that I use, Blogger. Blogger has been around since 1999 and has gone through MANY changes since the beginning. Once upon a time, you had to pay to receive the ability to do certain things with Blogger. In 2003, Google bought out Blogger and made those services available for free. Read below for my no-frills review of Blogger. I highlight the important features FOR YOU.



The one thing that REALLY differentiates Blogger from its biggest (free) competitor, Wordpress, is the ability to freely edit your own templates. [For a fee, you can gain the ability to freely edit Wordpress templates hosted at Wordpress.com] You can create your own template, use templates created by others, or use pre-designed templates. Minimal skills in HTML are necessary for the most novice of computer users. However, to truly edit a template, knowledge of CSS is needed. Arranging the components of your blog is also very easy to do. You can just slide components wherever you like.
Design Tools: B+

You don’t need a read me for Blogger. You can start a blog, and start writing right away without needing to go through the ‘Help’ website. Everything is clear cut so that novice and experience computer users can use it without any problems. Simply put, it is intuitive. This means a mom from Minnesota or a dad from Dallas can pick it right up and start their own blog.
East of Use: A

Because Blogger is owned by Google, you would think that there would be easy access to Google’s vast amount of tools for webmasters. But there isn’t. You need to go to separate Google web pages to submit your blog to its indexing service, sign up and get the code for its Google Analytics software, and yet again, you need to sign up on a separate website for Adsense / Adwords.
Tools: B-

The biggest advantage to using Blogger is that it is owned by Google. This makes it easy for you to register and install Adsense in your blog, as well as get indexed and appear in Google search results. It also pushes your blog and blogposts closer to the top of Google's search results since Google definitely loves itself!
X-Factor: A-


Come back on Monday for my review of Wordpress. And don't forget to sign up for email updates from FeedBlitz (on the left)!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's appropriate time to make some plans for the future and it is time to be happy. I've read this post and if I
could I wish to suggest you some interesting things
or tips. Maybe you can write next articles referring to this article.

I desire to read even more things about it!
Here is my web page :: Google Affiliate

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty pleased to find this website. I wanted to thank you for your time due to this wonderful read!! I definitely appreciated every bit of it and I have you saved to fav to check out new stuff in your blog.

Here is my site; http://www.novobr.com/user_detail.php?u=acllester

Anonymous said...

Highly descriptive post, I liked that bit. Will there be a part 2?


My site :: Read �

Trent R said...

This is a greatt post

Request Blog

If you would like me to address a certain topic or issue that concerns blogging, just leave me a comment with your question or topic request. Be sure to include your email or subscribe to my Feedblitz service so that you can be notified when I address your question.