Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Blogspot .. advantages and Drawbacks

"Blogger" the newly customized blogging service made by google. Millions of bloggers around the world are using it. all google's blogs are under the "blogspot" domain. This free service is famous between bloggers but still have many limits and drawbacks.

Advantages :

  • The blog templates are coded in a way that they're well viewed by the Google's search engines. So we can consider this as an advantage since your blog will get much traffic from google if you're using his templates. In fact the blog is easily crawled by spiders and any new keywords you use will be rapidly saved.
  • Blogger is flexible with all kind of entries like the bookmarking tools in footers and RSS subscription like FeedBurner.
  • Easy comments moderation and posts edition.
  • Adsense blends better and easily with blogspot, you will just allow you're template to be connected to your adsense account then blend the ads will be blended automatically with the background. You can easily put ads after every post. You don't have to get the code from your adsense account.

Drawbacks :

  • The dot blogspot subdomain can affect the image of your blog when it comes to advertisers to choose where to advertise for their products. Actually, it's not only about Blogger but it's the drawback of having a free domain name..
  • Unlike other Blogging templates themes, blogspot's aren't really beautiful. You can do a better presentation with WordPress. Moreover, the columns are difficult to manipulate; you can hardly get three columns with blogspot while it's easy with wordpress..

So if you're hesitating whether use it or not , this is the whole story.
Or if you're a blogspot user let's share what you liked about it and what you disliked...

5 comments:

Telling It Like It Is said...

I agree with you that Blogspot or "Blogger" has many advantages as you pointed out. I also agree that having a sub-standard URL with blogspot is a draw back, and I can say from experience that I'm not likely to click on those links found in search engines due to the appearance of less authority.

Of course, there have been many times where I've clicked on a search result link and was taken to a blog with it's own domain name, but hosted on blogger, and the template discouraged me and I looked elsewhere. Templates such as those bright colored, pink especially, "girly" or dark templates take away from even great posts.

Wordpress has definitely got a lot of people's attention, and for good reasons. Personally speaking, I would be more than willing to pay a reasonable fee for perhaps "premium" type improvements on Blogger, such as their offering some out-of-this-world templates.

I actually just completed a post on the topic on Blogger, titled "An Open Letter To Blogger.com" if you care to have a look-see.

Great post!

Anonymous said...

Hope you are aware that blogger do have the option to host your own domain name too! It is same with customization of templates(I use a customized one)

And Google analytics gives you a crawl code to embedded in your blog/website in which ever domain it is hosted.

Recent development is subscribing comments via email is also possible.

And more changes are expected from Blogger.com!

Walid Debbech said...

Thank you for the info Joel..
I really need to collect more informations about the Blogger updates.

A Guy said...

To follow up on what Joel said, Blogger now allows you to host your blogger blog for free at any domain you choose. They'll even arrange for you to purchase a domain name at a deep discount, and set up the DNS records for you. I did it in less than half an hour one day, and the next morning I had a blogger blog in my own domain that otherwise works exactly like the you.blogger.com blog, and the only cost was the domain (about $15.00/yr US). It's less if you buy it directly from Google, and less still if you buy a longer term.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, that was extremely valuable and interesting...I will be back again to read more on this topic.