Blogging service shootout: Blogger vs. WordPress

Site management

It's one thing to build a blog; it's another thing entirely to manage it. You need to handle comments, including deleting offensive posts and killing spam; read feedback from visitors; and handle polls and manage your blog from a mobile device, for a start.

Blogger

Blogger has been built for simplicity, and perhaps because of that, I wasn't wowed by its site-management tools. Still, what I found there was solid.

Blogger has the ability to either have posts go live immediately or schedule them. You can also turn comments on or off, and post via SMS and email. One nice touch is that you can authorize others to create posts for your blog, making it easy to create a group blog. And you can moderate your blog by removing comments and marking them as spam so that other comments sent by the same person will be removed as well.

Blogger also lets you create polls, and allows you to have your blog mapped to your own domain, rather than blogger.com, without extra cost. But it lacks some of WordPress's site-management tools, such as importing polls from poll-creation services.

WordPress

The WordPress.com hosted blogging service is built on top of the WordPress server-based blogging platform used by many companies to host and create blogs, so it should be no surprise that it excels at site management tools. It starts with the basics, such as being able to publish posts on a schedule and create a private blog. But it also offers a full-blown set of powerful site management tools.

I found a wealth of tools for managing comments made to a blog -- for example, it's easy to allow people to post comments on your site and to delete comments. There's also an automated spam-checker (WordPress uses a service called Akismet) that checks for comment-spam and then asks you if you want to delete it. And rather than having to delete, approve or unapprove individual comments, you can mark all of those you want to perform an action on, and then have it done in bulk.

It's also simple to create a feedback form for site visitors, and then go in and read it, keep feedback you want for later reference, and send the rest to the trash. And, as mentioned previously, if you want to have your own domain, rather than have your site end in a wordpress.com domain, it costs $17 per year. WordPress will do the domain registration for you.

There's more as well. You can let people rate your individual posts, and you can create polls, and import polls you've already created if you have an account with the poll-creation site PollDaddy.

In a world that's increasingly going mobile, there's another excellent feature -- you can have your site detect when it's being contacted by a mobile device rather than a computer, and then display the page in a way optimized for mobile.

All that comes with the free version of the service, which is paid for by advertising. If you're willing to pay for extras, you can get more. For $20 per year, you can get a service that lets you use SMS text messages to manage your site, including the ability to moderate comments. You can pay $29.97 to have ads removed from your blog. And there are lots of others as well. When it comes to site management, it's more powerful than Blogger.

Bottom line

I found WordPress to be far superior to Blogger when it comes to site management, most likely because it's built on top of the WordPress platform for managing blogs. Its comment-management tools are exemplary, and it offers plenty of extras such as creating polls, ratings for individual posts, and more. Blogger offers just the basics; however, those basics are quite simple to use.