Redesigning my company’s website and I wanted to add a blog. I don’t know which blog platform to use. I’ve been blogging for years and my blogging platform of choice has always been Blogger, for it’s easily designed templates and ease of use. I do have acct at other major blogs for commenting and reviewing but never started a blog anywhere else.
Upon my decision for a corporate blog, of course I chose Blogger as the platform of choice. Now I’m not so sure about using a hosted blog platform as I hear most of the negative about owning my own content.
For a company blog I hear its’ best to host your own content that way I have total control over what I say and how my content is handled. Would that be a problem for a business?
I hear I might need to expand by blog in the future, upon it’s success and importing past Blogger posts into WP is impossible. Any truth to that?
The company blog will not be profit focus and intend on relaying feedback and information to fellow professionals in my occupation. Any ideas or pro/cons on using Blogger for Business blogs? I searched google but all I could find were articles that said Blogger is bad for business blogs because of the lack of SEO. I want to know more about other issues that I have over looked.
My experience is that either can be used with equal effectiveness. I believe that this will be a surprise to a lot of WP users. Frequently they mention things like a belief that WP SEO is better. Properly optimized Blogger sites can be just as good, if not better, that WP. Where WP does have an SEO advantage is that it offers a lot of plugins such as the All-In-One SEO plugin that does the work for you. Best Blogger SEO will involve manual coding. Where Blogger has an advantage is that it’s much easier to learn. WP has a steeper learning curve. At one point I had a Blogger site and a WP site that offered the same content. The Blogger site came up when I did test searches for it whereas the WP site never showed up.
The point was made that with WP you own the content. Both WP.com and Blogger have limitations on how the respective site’s can be used. It is true that a self-hosted WP blog allows you to use the site as you wish but I’ve used my Blogger site with a custom domain and have never had a problem.
Both sites have thousands of templates, both free and premium, so that you should be able to find one with the look you like. Both have a good selection of professional or business templates, many of which are free. If you know a little about CSS or HTML you can customize virtually any template.
If I wanted a cheap/free site with as little SEO maintenance work as possible I’d use Wordpress.com. If you are technically oriented and like tinkering with your site go with WP. If you prefer ease of use go with Blogger.
That is exactly what I wanted to know. You hit the mark on what I was trying to explain (my typos and all). I’m not worried about SEO at all, my business site is highly ranked on Google and Bing, so I was planning on promoting the blog on the corporate site and maybe on our Twitter account. I get more than enough hits on the company site to where I would think our blog would get half that traffic. It’s not a mission critical blog nor am I expecting to make any profit from it, we just wanted to establish a blog to discuss our (the company) view on the market (we’re an private investment firm) and highlight our company culture. Thats pretty much the focus.
I was asked on another forum, “was I worried about server resources”. I’m not. We have three webservers for multiple business tasks but one corporate server with more than enough resources to host our own busy blog. I guess I don’t want to put up with the blog upgrades and maintenance. As I said before, I know blogger and have used it for just under 10 years. CSS alterations are not a problem on Blogger/blogspot. We too have our custom domain (blog.domain.com) on blogger and I do think that helps with identity of the company.
My only true concern is content being hosted on an outside source. Still not sure and happy about hosting the content with Blogger and not on my own server. But we have decided to go with Blogger as a test, see if it works out as for our blogging goal. I have no doubts about it, long time Blogspot user here. At the same time it would be nice to transfer some of that misc web traffic to an outside source, will save us money on more server costs … assuming the blog takes off.
I think Blogger doesn’t suit at all for business.
Lack of SEO, lake of professionnalism.
Wordpress is munch better, good for SSEO, you have your own content, you have the power to do anything you want with it, add plugins, add professionnal design.