Customizing Your Blogger Template

Customizing Your Blogger Template

There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is Wordpress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress, the earliest now termed as “Wordpress” at Wordpress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed “Wordpress.com” which is of course available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We’ll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of Wordpress. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, Wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

Watch the video related to blogger

Ever wanted to upload a video to your Blogger blog? Check out this video tutorial! Please help us improve our videos by filling out this short survey: spreadsheets.google.com

Help answer the question about blogger

Blogger plugin mana yang terbaik?
Menurut kalian dari salah satu plugin untuk Blogger berikut ini mana yang paling nyaman, dan keren untuk digunakan di Blogger

1. AddThiss.com http://addthis.com
2. Sharethis.com http://sharethis.com
3. BlogSocializer http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/index.htm

fungsinya yang buat masang widgets social bookmarker

About Author


Gobala Krishnan is the author of the best-selling beginner’s guide to using Wordpress as niche Adsense websites. You can download two free chapters of his book at http://www.WordpressAdsenseSystem.com

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12 Responses to “Customizing Your Blogger Template”

  1. GONJES says:

    bro, wah bener tuh kadang aku juga gitu sih tapi biasanya aku tinggal alamat email buat yang mau tau lebih lanjut !
    teks link merupakan teks yang sudah ditautkan dengan alamat tertentu misalnya halaman iklan dll, menjual link aku tidak tahu pasti tapi menurut versi ku menjual link berarti penghasilan akan kta peroleh jika ada yang mengunjungi link yang kita promosikan.
    tapi masalah diatas bukan keahlian saya lho, nah sekarang saya akan kasih tau PTC indo, daftarnya lewat sini http://adf.ly/QJt ( halaman iklan gak usah dibaca, klik skip ad di pjok kanan atas). yang ini gak repot, masuk ke alamata webnya, rgister, konfirmasi email, setelah itu login, cari surf ad, ada 4 iklan di standar ad. Nah klik satu persatu iklan tersebut, jangan tutup window sampai ada tanda dolar yang berarti perolehan dolar kamu sudah ditambahkan. mudah kan. PTC ini juga ada sistem referal yang dapat mempercepat kamu mengoleksi dolarnya

    untuk menjual link , aku tahu caranya dan aku yakin kebanyakan mereka yang koar2 itu belum tau cara ini . namun aku tidak mau membagi gratis, aku akan bagi hanya kepada mereka yang benar2 serius dan imbalannya terhadap ku adalah menjadi referal ku !

    kirim email ke muhammadjumani@gmail.com jika kamu berminat

  2. Wordpress says:

    impressive
    impressive leh!!!

  3. ??? says:

    1. ajarin aq dunk caranya ganti tema n ngasih2 poto di blog q n gmn cara masukin data ke blog q
    http://help.blogger.com/bin/static.py?page=start.cs

    2. n q mau tanya apa c fungsinya blog n apa manfaatnya
    http://www.blogger.com/features

    ^^v semoga membantu!!

  4. WPMixer says:

    Nice video…

  5. WPBlog Shop says:

    Oh my gosh you guys have a channel-and here I was wasting time with Yahooanswers…

    Please, please PLEASE tell me-why do my images automatically align to the top all the time-without me being able to move them where I want..

    I.e…I type this<——————-
    [Click to add image here] |
    Images ends up going above this text no matter what…

    Do people load images on blogger first and then type between them?

  6. Anonymous says:

    I have recently checked my old blogger cite where all the language in translated into hebrew I don’t know how this happened but I can’t change it because I can’t read and the page is not translating back to english

  7. itu salah satu kelemahan google. kalau tidak kita minta, dia akan tetap menyimpan halaman web yang dia index.
    jadi, kalau sudah disimpan google, sampai kita mati pun akan tetap ada. kecuali kalau kita meminta langsung ke googlenya untuk dihapus.

  8. cantika says:

    Coba dilihat panduan dasar tentang blogger disini
    http://artikelkomputerku.blogspot.com/2008/08/daftar-isi-tips-dan-tutorial-blog.html

  9. cari di blogskin.com aja….
    disitu bnyk skin2 bwt blog yg keren2…

    tp klo mw dr blogskin, hrs ngerti bnyk ttg kode2 html. krn bnyk kode2 yg hrs diganti…

  10. Free Blog says:

    short n simple..nice vid!
    thanks!XD

  11. Blogger says:

    title can be change
    url also can be change
    even profile name also can be change

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