As most of you will know, I recently moved my blog over from Blogger to Wordpress. I thought I’d do a quick post explaining why, and now that I have had time to really get to know Wordpress, why it is better.

There were two reasons I decided to move from Blogger to Wordpress. The first was that I wanted greater power and flexibility than Blogger provides. Blogger is truly push-button publishing. It is so easy to use that anyone who can write an email can start a blog. But, as Scoble was recently talking about, it is hard to get the balance right between making something easy to use and making it powerful enough. An example was the Blogger feed. I use Feedburner, and wanted to replace the Atom feed automatically generated for me with the Feedburner feed that provided an associated style sheet and stats in the metadata. In this instance, Blogger was not very usable, because there was no simple way to do this. I had to search hard on the internet to find the solution, and even then I was unable to remove the Atom feed from the choice of feeds. Here Blogger had gone overboard on usability. It had made the product too easy to use, in the process removing functionality.

The second reason I felt I needed to switch was credibility. Blogs hosted at the domain blogspot.com are rarely credible, well read blogs, and I thought that in order to take Gizbuzz to the next level it would have to be on its own domain. I had already bought Gizbuzz.co.uk, so I decided to move it over exclusively to that domain. This adds more credibility to the blog, and removes the ‘glass ceiling’ that I think Blogger blogs experience. I am not sure why Blogger blogs have this problem. It certainly does not apply to blogs hosted at wordpress.com. I suspect that the over ease of use that Blogger provides subconciously makes A-list bloggers distainful of Blogger blogs, and thus they link to them less. I could be wrong though.

There were two disadvantages to moving. Firstly, I would have to find hosting that provided enough features without costing too much. I solved that problem by quite a radical solution; self-hosting. Gizbuzz is hosted on a dedicated ubuntu old laptop attached to my network. It works well, and I have not had any reports of Gizbuzz running slowly. My broadband connection is actually quite fast, and is being upgraded to 8mb in the next few weeks. This approach would not be sustainable were Gizbuzz recieiving A-list blog traffic, but it is not, and if it were I would be able to make enough money from advertising to fund proper hosting. It is not a problem that needs addressing at the moment.

The second disadvantage is that Gizbuzz had built up some credibility at its former address, which unfortunately could not be taken with it to its new address. Some big blogs had linked to it, such as Download Squad, InsideGoogle and Google Blogoscoped, and Gizbuzz had accumulated a reasonable PageRank (1, quite a good rank for a site only 4 months old). All this was lost when I moved the site. However, I have actually seen an increase in traffic since I moved. This proves two things. Firstly, it shows that Gizbuzz has a good loyal readership, as well as the one-off traffic from Google, Technorati etc. Secondly, it bears out my theory that blogs hosted at their own domain rather than a subdomain of blogspot.com have a better credibility. The traffic levels had stagnated at gizbuzz.blogspot.com, and now they are on a steady increase.

All in all, I think my move has been a success. Wordpress isn’t perfect, but it is better than Blogger, especially for a tech savvy person. And when the only costs involved were the domain, at about £6 for two years, I don’t doubt I made the right decision. Peter is so impressed, he is also thinking of moving his blog from peterwebdev.blogspot.com to its own domain and Wordpress.

PS. If any of you do have Wordpress, they have just released an update, which includes performance and security improvements. It’s so easy to upgrade (all you have to do is overwrite the files from the previous install) that there really is no reason not to do it. It takes 30 secs.