Sayantani is a hard-core blogger.com fan and till now didn’t know about WordPress. Now after seeing this blog, she is thinking of moving to WordPress. But she is “very satisfied” with Blogger and wants me to really “sell” wordPress to her. So that is exactly what I am going to do here.
What follows is an overview cum how to on WordPress. If you too have been contemplating a move to WordPress but are scared of losing all you’re posts on Blogger, then worry no more. WordPress allows you to import not only Blogger, but also TypePad, LiveJournal, MoreMovableType, and a couple more.
Blog Must-Haves Absent from Blogger
Long time WordPress users will highlight probably a zillion reasons why WP rocks and Blogger doesn’t (Probably the only Google product I don’t like). But to limit the scope of this article to the needs of a non-techie, non-geeky blogger, I’ll highlight just a few; of course WP supports all of these and a lot more:
- Blogger does not support categories, which means you cannot organize posts by subject, hence a reader has to scroll endlessly to read how you feel about say “Why I hate my boss.”
- In Blogger you must manually edit a theme to be able to use it. Changing the template means that you redo your code again. Ok for a geek, but do you know HTML?
- In Blogger, you cannot password protect a post.
- In Blogger, as the author, you have no control of who is posting what in post comments. WordPress has advanced comment control such as requiring approval before comment appears and block comments based on symptoms like multiple hyper links, abusive language etc. You can even block the IP of people who spam your blog.
- In Blogger you cannot post if you do not have an Internet connection. IN WP, you can post using your corporate email account.
How do you get Started?
WordPress comes in two flavors. The first WordPress is an online blogging system powered by the WordPress publishing solution. It uses a less customizable version of WordPress using which you can create and manage their own weblogs without requiring the time, money and technical knowledge.
If you want more control over your blog, you can always download the WordPress software and host it on a web host of your choice. I started my blogging using WordPress.com but soon moved to a web host of my own choice thereby giving me the opportunity to do everything “by hand.” Before you decide to take the plunge, I suggest that yuou sign-up for a free account on WordPress.com, and later on move to a web host.
Importing Blogger into WordPress.
Making a move to WP from Blogger, doesn’t mean that you will have to dump your old posts or comments. WP has a built in functionality to import from Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, and MovableType.
I myself made the move from Blogger to WordPress a few months ago and came across this post to be extremely useful, and strongly recommend that you also read it from top to bottom.