So I finally did it: I switched from Joomla to Wordpress! I’d been debating about it for at least 6 months. The site itself looked pretty damn good, but Joomla just wasn’t the best platform. In fact, it kind of sucked. It seemed great at first, but it was inefficient as hell and really time consuming to manage. The template looked fab, but there was so much coding involved; the smallest change often turned into a big headache, which got me running to Kristi for help more than once. I held on to the site as it was for months, partly because I didn’t want her work to go to waste, until I realized it was a weak excuse which had basically turned my website into a dead page. The traffic, which used to be pretty decent (considering it’s never been more than a personal website) has completely died at this point. The only traffic I get now is accidental, not targetted at all, and thus useless.

Wordpress always struck me as this uptight blogging platform that only nerdy middle aged men would use, until I decided to give the sucker a try and installed it on another website last month. I have to say, I’m impressed! It also beats Blogspot by far.

So after having used all 3, which is really the best? I made a quick comparison list with both positive and negative sides.

Blogspot:
+ Owned by Google, and surrounded by a pretty active network/community of users. If you’re looking to get a ton of traffic without too much effort, Blogspot is great.
+ Easy to set up. Easy to use. If you’re not too big on coding, Blogspot is your best option.
- Very limited choice of templates, and not many options offered for customization. You might want to avoid Blogspot if you want to create a super original website that stands out of the crowd.
- Glitches and technical problems. Now, I don’t know if they actually fixed that because I haven’t used it in over a year, but Blogspot definitely used to have down times and errors on a regular basis. Sometimes I would post a new entry, and then get a stupid error message telling me to try again later. Very annoying.
- Whatever you do with it, your Blogspot will always remain a pretty dull and basic page.
- Archives are badly organized. This might not be an issue if you only update once every month or so, but if you write on a daily basis, you’ll quickly notice that finding old posts (or making them easily accessible for readers) is a big problem.

Joomla:
+/- Joomla is a content management system (CMS), not a blogging platform per se; so depending on how you want your site to be, this could either be a good thing or a bad thing.
+ There are literally zillions of templates available for free all over the net. The possibilities to make a really cool looking website are endless.
+ Setup is okay. Not too complicated but it could be better.
+ Lots of neat little modules and features that can be added (optional)
+ Member registration: especially handy if you want to make certain parts of your website only accessible for members (which can strictly be friends and family, if you prefer).
- You might want to brush up on your CSS and PHP coding if you don’t want to end up stuck with the default template.
- The back end is literally like a maze: way too many pages, folders, files, and options. Not very efficient!
- If you want to blog: don’t go with Joomla. It’s just not practical enough.
- Joomla is heavy. The average loading time is generally slower than regular sites, and backing up your data could take hours.
- Not search engine friendly at all. The way it categorizes the pages, names them and links them, is just plain bad. My page rank dropped dramatically after I switched to Joomla, and so did my visitors.

Wordpress:
+ It was made for bloggers, so it’s efficient and practical.
+ Great archiving tools, you can also categorize your posts, which is especially useful if you write a lot. Or even if you don’t, it’s just a great option to have.
+ Very search engine friendly.
+ The setup literally took me 2 minutes.
+ Lots of templates available on the net. Maybe not as much as Joomla, BUT, Wordpress has an easy interface (quite similar to Blogspot actually, although more complete) that makes customization a whole lot easier. You will however need to have at least some basic knowledge of CSS and PHP.
+ New posts are auto-saved every few minutes while you’re typing them. Brilliant!
+ Member registration and login: again, useful if you don’t want certain posts or pages to be public. It will also block search engines from listing them.
+ Great anti-spam tools for comments.
+ Lets you add “regular” pages, so you can actually build a whole website around your blog, instead of only having a blog with a basic profile page (and I’m hinting to Blogspot here).

I couldn’t really think of any negative points for Wordpress. It basically does all a blogger needs.

I’m still busy customizing the site right now, so I’ll post more later!
xxx
Lisa