Blogger or WordPress? - when You wanna focus on the actual creative work.

This may come in handy:

When it comes to launching a blog, one of the major steps You need to take is to choose a blogging platform. Suppose You feel excited and are looking forward to get published. It would be tempting to just pick anything to serve as the ground of Your self-publishing venture. Since the main available options aren't interchangeable the choice between the two is worth pausing for a while and taking a little bit closer look on which one would serve You most. The good news is that there are only two platforms on the very top of popularity - although there are many more out there, those two count the most. They are called Blogger and WordPress.

^{Business image created by Katemangostar - Freepik.com}

The essential difference.
In My opinion it comes down to the question: what is Your focus?

If You wanna just write, get published, build a group of readers, and so on - and on the other hand You prefer to invest time and energy directly into Your actual creative work - Blogger seems to be the right choice because it saves You much hassle. Choosing Blogger You are pretty much good-to-go both to begin - and to develop Your blogging carrier. The reason for that is with Blogger You'll find many things just working out-of-the-box - while in WordPress achieving similar effects is often connected with additional effort (time and/or money consuming).

A good example emerges when You'd like to turn Your blog into something which won't be looking like thousands of others. Although Your articles could be original and worth reading - their "covering" won't follow suit, resembling tons of others blogs with content of greatly diversified quality. If You'd like Your work to be served to Your Audience in a way different than ordinary - You need greater customization. Technically-wise it is accomplished mainly through programming work and graphic design. So it looks like You would be in the need of gaining new skills or getting in touch with someone who already has proper expertise.

Fortunately there are some things You could do by Yourself, some of them You could even achieve via simple copy&paste. There are various how-to's out there - including whole dedicated places specializing in explaining how to achieve various effects, handing complete & ready-to-use code snippets, etc.

But one thing is crucial: You won't be able to use much of them in WordPress right away and without paying some extra fees - while in Blogger You won't stumble upon such limitations.

Although in theory both Blogger and WordPress are offered as platforms free of charge - in case of WordPress a free part is pretty small, because all the juicy features and possibilities has been reserved for paid so called "plans".

"(...) you must have either WordPress.com Premium or WordPress.com Business active on your site to be able to add custom CSS to your site". ^{(https://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/editing-css/)}

"If you would like to add any code that you want, the WordPress.com Business Plan now offers that option". ^{(https://en.support.wordpress.com/code/)}

So even if You could do some coding by Yourself - in order to harness this in WordPress.com You will need to pay monthly fees. As an alternative You could hire someone who will install WordPress as a standalone platform - which will also probably cost You some money. How much? It depends (i.a.) on:

• is hosting You've chosen free or paid?,
• are the support and/or updates included - or is it more of a one-time service?;

So if You care about the shape of Your blog - choosing WordPress leaves You with a bunch of additional stuff You'll need to handle, whereas choosing Blogger enables You to do more by Yourself, no strings attached. But if You wanna have a completely no-hassle experience, being able to fully concentrate on Your work - You will need to hire a competent person to do all the designing (programming- and graphic-wise), but this time the prize should be considerably smaller, because:

• You don't need to pay for hosting service (because Blogger is always self-hosted, using probably most reliable service in the world: powered by Google),
• You don't need to pay for installation service (because Blogger is already installed),
• there aren't any monthly fees,
• technically-wise Blogger is simpler than WordPress (so in order to achieve something a programmer often need to handle less complexity);

On top of that there is one more thing worth keeping in mind in case if You've decided to choose a standalone version of WordPress. Thanks to its open character (the whole mechanics is available to anyone) and popularization WordPress is vulnerable to various malicious practices (from hacking Your site to taking it over) - while in case of Blogger breaching security is much less likely to happen because of its close character (the core mechanics is secured "under the hood" and not publicly available - so it's much harder to mess with it).

If You've chosen WordPress, a very good idea would be to care for it to be always up-to-date with security patches and upgrades (which means someone will need to handle all of that stuff). If You are wondering is it worth the trouble - consider that alongside growing popularity of Your website its exposure to potential attacks also increases. Think of years of work which could vanish in a blinking of an eye: even if You've backuped Your articles, to restore all of them would be pretty much hassle, let alone of lost reputation which has been built by years (from the so-called SEO point of view).

So it would be a good idea to care about security - the question is: how much hassle it will be incorporating.

Let's go back to the big picture. Bearing all the things described above in mind - in case You are a journalist, publicist or would like to be a blogger, presenting Your work in an elegant, characteristic, aesthetic way - and on the other hand You'd like to encounter as little hassle as possible to get things done (especially in the long run) in order to be optimally focused on the core matters - it may be a good idea to consider Blogger instead of WordPress.

"(...) the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run". ^{("Walden", Henry Thoreau)}

A word to future designers.
If You'd like, however, to become a Blogger templates designer Yourself, there is another good news: although both Blogger and WordPress require some programming skills, in case of Blogger You need to learn considerably less, because:

1. There is no need to learn PHP and MySQL (technologies often connected with so-called CMS's) - because they are not so directly involved in the Blogger templates' syntax (in comparison, designing a WordPress template incorporates pretty much PHP code - and if You wanna use a standalone variant, You need also to know how to setup a MySQL database).
2. You don't need to learn how to install and configure the platform on the server (because everything is already set - You may just need to do some basic, easy-to-comprehend configuration via Blogger dashboard).
3. Last but not least, in My opinion the Blogger template syntax seems to be quite user-friendly, especially regarding those of us who are used to consider ourselves more humanists than programmers.