When creating a blog, there are countless possibilities of hosts and platforms that you can use to make it. Personally, I decided to choose Blogger as it was the one that I'd heard the most about and, after having a quick tour of it, felt the most comfortable with. I'm not an expert on other hosts and only know the basics, but I know pretty much everything there is about Blogger, after using it for almost 2 years. Today, I thought I'd share with you the pros and cons of Blogger, which might affect your decision in choosing it.
THE PROS
One of the main positive points of Blogger is that it's completely free to run and use. There are no hidden cost or fees, and they even allow you to use their own URL (.blogspot.com) instead of buying your own. This is particularly useful for people who are new to blogging and don't want to spend a lot of money or simply just to trial, without being tied down by payments.
One of my favourite parts about Blogger is how user-friendly it is, making it extremely easy to do anything. In fact, it's probably possible to set up your blog, choose a layout and publish your first post within minutes, due to it being incredibly easy to navigate. This makes it ideal for anyone starting out with blogging, as editing HTML code isn't absolutely necessary (although favourable) and any blog-related tasks can easily be carried out.
Blogger is powered by Google, meaning that all of your Google accounts will be synchronised with your blog and help it to run more efficiently. Although some people might dislike this, I find it to be very helpful, especially for Google Plus and Gmail, as it means I don't have to manage them and it is partially taken care of for me. This is also helpful for things like your calendar, Google Drive and even comments. Since Google is involved, having a blog on Blogger can also help your search engine optimisation.
There are also some other added perks of using Blogger that you might not realise, such as there being no storage limit due to being linked to Google Cloud, security being taken care of by Google and the fact that you can easily customise the code. Also, if you accidentally delete your blog, it is possible to recover it for the next 3 months, meaning accidents will never cause your blog to be gone forever.
THE CONS
One of the negatives of Blogger is that the statistics in Blogger aren't the most accurate and are unreliable if you want a clear representation of how your blog is doing. Although they are clear and easy to read, a lot of the information may be dated or not exact. If you're looking for true and realistic results, Google Analytics is much more detailed and functions better. I'm hoping that this will be integrated into Blogger in the future, as it would make analysing your blog statistics much easier and more efficient.
Uploading photos into Blogger is quite an ordeal, as they often tend to be automatically resized, with the dimensions changed. Also, if you want to change the size of the image within the post, there are only a couple of options available, whereas with other blog hosts the image size can be fully customised. This makes it hard to create the perfect size image and means that you will have to do some coding to fix it, which isn't the best solution for some people, especially those that don't know much about HTML.
The Blogger templates aren't the most aesthetically pleasing and are quite basic in layout. This means that you may have to do a fair bit of customisation and coding to get it how you want, or you can simply download a template. There is a wide variety of templates on offer, some free and others costing a small fee, but I'd definitely recommend looking into this if you want to improve your blog design. The template that I currently used was downloaded for free from the Internet, and I find it to be much more visually appealing than with Blogger templates.
Overall, I'd say that I really like Blogger and, despite there being a few things that I dislike about it, it meets my needs and wants. When I was starting out, I wanted blogging to be an easy task that was stress-free, and I feel that this has been achieved by using Blogger, with its easy to navigate user interface and clear layout.
2 comments
I think for those starting out, blogspot is a really great option! I currently use it and like it as it's free and serves its purpose well, but I think I will eventually move to my own domain. Great post! :)
ReplyDeleteFoundations of My Life
I agree, as everything is really easy to understand and ensures that you can do everything that a beginner would want to. Thank you very much! x
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