Topic:
HubSpot,
Sales Tips
(4 Minute Read)
Hi (cue grin), I’m Jon from Noisy little Monkey, this is our Digital Marketing Vlog, where we answer questions from people around the place (*around the place = the internet) who want to know how to make their businesses work better on line. So, we've had a question from Lee in Southampton and she says, which is better? Blogger or WordPress, for when you’re just starting out in business? Because both of those are free platforms where you can put your website without having to pay any money.
@noisymonkey Blogspot or Wordpress? Discuss ;)
— Lee Williams MUA (@AfterHrsBeauty) June 26, 2013
So, well looking at it from a looks point of view, the winner is definitely WordPress. And I’m not all about the looks (clearly) but blogger is Butt Ugly (technical term) I certainly wouldn't go for it on my website, and you shouldn't go for it on yours. The other reason why WordPress wins out is that it has a lot more themes that you can choose from, both on the free website you’ll have At WordPress.com and also (should you upgrade and put it on your own web domain) you can get a huge variety of themes. So from a looks/aesthetics point of view, checkout WordPress, WordPress wins clearly for us.
Functionality? Well Blogger really doesn't give you a great deal of functionality. There’s not a great a deal of plug-ins or anything else you can use on your blog. On something like WordPress, again you've got quite a lot of functionality built in, and when you upgrade (which is something you can’t do with blogger - which we’ll come back to) you will be able to install even more functionality to give your users a better user experience; to gain more enquiries. So, once again WordPress gives you better functionality. It’s also way more flexible than Blogger, you can move your menus about and do all of that kinda stuff.
What about search engine optimisation (SEO)? Well, arguably having either of these living on the native domain on which you buy them e.g. you.blogspot.com or you.wordpress.com, having either of your websites on these domains doesn't really do you any good! They’re living on the sub-domains of the people you bought the website from. So, I would upgrade at somewhere like cloudnext, which is a British hosting company, it maybe costs you £5 a year* (we don’t make any money out of that by the way, we're not on commission) you can then put your website at e.g. www.yourwebsite.co.uk. You can do that with WordPress because you're driving all of those links and ‘social love’ at your domain NOT to the person who you bought the website from.
*Jon's a little out of touch, they now charge £19.99 a year. But they're still great value.
In terms of price, I wouldn't think about price, this is free after all... but you are going to be investing your time if you’re starting a new business. So I would think in terms of what is the return on investment (ROI) for your time? Where does the value lie? Once again, because you can put it all right here, on your own domain from WordPress, you can start on the WordPress domain (you can upgrade for about a fiver or tenner) and Google will love all of the content that lives on your domain. Once again it’s WordPress.
TL;DR – Blogger: ugly, crap and owned by Google, WordPress: Independent and works really really well. Thanks, see you next time.
Hat tip - Moz.com for their awesome and more in depth Whiteboard Fridays. Thanks for the ongoing inspiration guys!
Founder and Technical Director of Noisy Little Monkey, Jon blogs about SEO and digital marketing strategy.
