So it is official now, I am on my own domain using Wordpress to make post. I just wanted to do a quick why I decided to do this, and hopefully long term it will pay for itself.
http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/wordpress-vs-blogger-which-one-is-better-pros-and-cons/
I Own It
So first, I love google, but its nice to own your post, content and ideas. Since what this means essentially is at the will of Google, they could remove my site. Mind you its very rare and I doubt my site would, but you never know.
With Wordpress, I own the domain - shouho.net now and I just installed Wordpress for the ease of use and bam - I am back up and running. It was not too difficult to move post over, I used a plugin and then did some manual fixing. It was not too bad and I am good with it now. I might make some changes in the future but overall I feel good about the move.
Easy to Install
Again, super easy to install on my domain. I would have totally done a blogger one if Google had it - but sadly they only offer the option of free hosting on their domain and linking it to my domain. Blogger pretty huge so if they ever work on it, I would totally revisit this thought.
Easy to Customize
I did not buy a custom theme, as of yet but I do not enough HTML to make this look decent. I changed the widths and text on things, colors, etc. I still would like to put an image on the top as well, I can do that eventually here. I think part of investing in a personal domain is investing in how you WANT the website to actually look and feel, and I want it to feel easy to navigate, like people will come here to get templates and maybe read reviews.
Wordpress offers an amazing selection of free and cheap as well as custom themes to pick from. If you are using blogger you know it can be difficult to customize, without the sha-bang of knowing HTML and doing it all by hand. Even then it was difficult to understand the coding and layout styles. Anyway, wordpress is very user friendly and I taught myself in about a day at my previous job. It's very basic, and similar to live journal formatting.
Plugins / SEO Control
So with blogger google has a massive amount of cred on its own search engine and it auto locations your stuff (SEO) for you. Which is great. I can still search for stuff on there pretty easily, which is why I left the blogger up. However I can customize and optimize it using my own SEO tools and plugins for every search engine, although everyone should use Google. I think this will be handy going forward, as I like the ability to view it and customize it.
Simple Content Management System
I considered separating post out by topic since, to be honest, I am all over the place with interest. BUT I am not here to make money with my blog, only the art portion of what I do. I could sell my freebies, and one day I might list them one day in the planner stuff. However I like make them available free for the moment and I think its one of the best and funner things on here to go get.
With Wordpress I can add more pages and sort them in the menu to reflect better upon their topic. The category system here is similar to blogger however because I try to link every post in their own page of content - it makes finding things easier. Of over 280+ post, you can find the top 10 projects easy this way. Find exactly what you want quicker than sorting through post via categories. Man I hope that made sense, it makes it so much easier to have real pages and content labels!
So as you can see, I am pretty happy with overall switching. Yes it was a good amount of cost, but I think I like the formatting better, the ease of use and the way I can add in items and such. The biggest thing I liked with blogger is it allowed me to auto cross post to FB and schedule the post in advance - as I try to make a few weeks worth in case I get busy/etc at a time. I also like being able to do DIY projects whenever I feel like it - and plan ahead. I would like to add videos in the future, maybe I am still unsure if I would like that but it would be a great add in medium. Either way, I hope this to be a successful move and help me write/blog better and more often in a manner people will return to see!
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