Extreme Blog Makeover: A Pastors Sojourn from Blogger to WordPress
Posted on 16. Jul, 2008 by Aaron Marshall in Church, Church2.0, How To, Social Media, Social Networking
Chad Lewis is one of the awesome pastors at my church. He had been blogging for years but took a break for awhile. When he decided to get back into it he looked around and realized that blogging had come a long way. He felt like his old blog account with blogger was inadequate. We gave his blog a WordPress makeover.
Before
After
WordPress has a Tool that Makes it SUPER Simple to Import Your Blogger Posts AND Comments
Chad had posts and comments all the way back to 2005. Using the WordPress import tool I was able to pull all of that seamlessly into his new blog. Phew.
My Take On The WordPress Philosophy
The core philosophy of WordPress is to be open and very community driven. It always nice to have a paid company to rely on for support but when it comes to online publishing, proprietary and dependence are nasty beasts.
Using WordPress is like Using a Professional Camera
It takes a little more to learn but you can really do amazing things with it. I am not here to do a feature comparison between Blogger and WordPress, but I want to impress on my readers that WordPress is an awesome solution. Especially, if you know someone who can teach you to work it.
It should be noted that Chad’s site was created with WordPress.ORG not WordPress.COM Whats the difference?
I think the clear benefit to running a WordPress blog is that it is 100% customizable. Blogger, despite your best attempts, comes with the Blogger toolbar at the top of the page, and several templates that all have a similar “look and feel” to other Blogger blogs. I guess it depends upon what your goals are: a customizable blog, then Blogger is your deal, but WordPress allows you a blog on steroids that is really an entry-level CMS. Much better than Blogger for a full website.
About 2.5 years ago I was getting ready to take a trip to Dubai. I wanted to set up a blog that I could update with pictures and text while I was there. Initially I wanted to set up a wordpress blog as it looked more robust. I already had my own domain, so I wanted to host it myself. Right away I was intimidated with having to create a sql database and all that kind of stuff. I only had 1 day before I left for my trip, so I decided to go with blogger. It was super easy to install on my site. However, once I got to Dubai and started updating, I was furious. Even though I was hosting the blog on my site, you still had to login through blogger to upload and write (this was 2.5 years ago, so it may be different now). I was very limited to what the blog had to look like, colors, picture arrangement and stuff like that. I remember spending hours and hour uploading pictures. And then blogger went down for 2 days or something. Yes, I was frustrated. I continued to use blogger on and off for the next year.
Then, I started a ministry blog. I decided to figure out this wordpress thing. It wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be… but it’s not an easy task for someone who knows nothing or little about setting up their own website. After having a wordpress blog for about 2 months, I installed wordpress to replace my personal blog. I love the openess to it. The 3rd party plugins are amazing! Seriously, wordpress is the best… if you’re going to host your own blog. I also have many friends who just use the wordpress hosted blog and they like it a lot too. It is limited, but not as much as blogger was.
Google owns blogger, don’t they? I would have expected more. I’m a big fan of Google innovation… maybe something better is down the road.
I can sum up why I prefer WordPress to Blogger in two words: 1) Community & 2) Plug-ins (and really, #2 comes from #1).
There is an active user community that really believes in helping people who are new to the platform figure things out. If such a thing exists on Blogger, I never saw it.
Plus, the huge selection of plug-ins give you some fantastic tools for making a WordPress blog more appealing to readers, commenters and to just generally building your own community around your blog.
WordPress KICKS blogger’s TAIL! because it’s open source, so you can modify it as much as you want. The CMS is great! You can get better skins/themes, you can basically make your own website. Way better IMHO
I had a really hard time with wordpress, I felt like blogger was more user friendly.
Hands down WordPress. But I’m a believer in using a tool that fits the purpose you are using it for. I’ve trained many people on blogging, and based on what they want to do, I recommend the one that fits.
I like WordPress because of the ability to customize and tweak, but I suggest Blogger to many people who want an easy, no-nonsense solution, and who really want something simple.
I just switched from blogger to wordpress about a week ago. I love how easy the import is.
I could not get allof my posts to import. It stopped at 150 for some reason. However, I as able to get ll except one comment. This hasbeen frustratingBut I do love WordPress.
I used Blogger for 2 years and migrated to WordPress over this past summer. It is truly an amazing platform. I should have done it along time ago.
Just a note if you publish Blogger via FTP to a GoDaddy hosted website you cannot successfully transfer posts b/c of GoDaddy’s firewall. You will need to establish a WordPress.com blog, import Blogger posts to the WP.com blog, and THEN you can export and import the posts into a Hosted website running WordPress. Just FYI.