Why I hate Blogspot/Blogger – Why I love WordPress

We all have reasons for the hosting provider that we use – from cheap sites to those with more bells and whistles. Free hosting usually means you have next to nothing in bandwidth, one decent banner in rotation will exceed your bandwidth and you are left with a blank space on your page.

What escapes me is why so many will settle for less than an optimal site. Blogspot is one such web host – you are restricted by what they will allow you to post. This is not only content, but in scripts as well.

Besides the fact that when they (blogger – blogspot) go down, they are not responsive to requests for information. That’s because you are getting exactly what you are paying for in this case. It doesn’t matter to google – about your site – if blogger or blogspot goes down, it matters only to them for their advertising dollars. Even if you are using your own domain name on their platform, you have no control about their uptime, or should I say downtime, issues. Add to that the problems folks have when they want to comment on your blog… what a nuisance!

WordPress has a superior platform with more and more gadgets (plugins) available to make your home on the web different than everyone else’s site! With thousands of themes to choose from, I don’t understand why people want to be limited by blogger and their kingdom rules.

Here is an offer for you.

For the month of December, if you buy hosting through my affiliate link here:

• Installation of your chosen theme
• Your settings defaults
• Changing the permalink structure
• WordPress SEO plugin
• AKISMET for spam
• A cool comment plugin to close posts with one click
• A Favicon generator – and will upload your provided logo
• A social media plugin with all of your social media targets for following (as long as you give me the info)
• A blogroll with the blogs you follow listed (as long as you provide them)
• A statistics gadget to give you insight of your visitors
• Categories list (provided by you)
• Tag cloud (tags provided by you)
• A twitter plugin that automatically puts your new posts on twitter (you must provide your sign on to set up the application)
• A URL shortener
• Feedburner
• Sitemap
• Set up google analytics (or input your code if you already use it)
• I will build one additional page (About Me or something like that)

This is about 2 days work once you provide me with the information I need. Once it is set up, I will email you all of the signons that I created for your site, and give you a walk-though of your blog and a walk-through of the hostgator cPanel by telephone – this will take approximately one hour.

The walk-throughs include the following:

Hostgator cPanel:

• Setting up email accounts
• Retrieving emails on the web portal
• Setting up emails through outlook
• Uploading images through file manager
• Site backups – I offer a contract for site backup at $12 a year on my secure server which is inaccessible from the web

Site Statistics:

• Signon
• Setting stats to Private
• Overview of statistics (if you wish)

Google Analytics:

• Signon

Your WordPress blog:

• Signon
• New posts
• Editing posts
• Setting of featured Images (if available within your theme)
• Inserting images into posts
• Scheduling posts
• Use of the SEO plugin
• Use of the twitter plugin
• Comments management – spam/closing/approving/editing
• Pages
• Setting categories/tags
• How to monitor plugins for updates
• Inserting a new header to replace the standard
• How to change your theme’s default settings

Now, if you are on blogspot and want your blog transported to a top level domain – I also do blogspot to wordpress migrations. This takes more work than setting up a new site, but for December, I will perform this move for the small fee of $50.00 in addition to the affiliate link referral. This involves more than using the importer button in wordpress, the goal is to get a post-to-post redirection from your old blogger blog to the new wordpress blog. If you are not concerned about link juice – this may not matter to you at all. There are limitations to bloggers backups, but I will be happy to discuss those with you if you are interested in a migration.

In return, I ask for a link in the footer of your site to my site, here, and a short testimonial blurb that I can post in my portfolio. I usually charge anywhere from $150 – $400 for this service. Why not take advantage of my Christmas spirit?

1. You don’t go through my affiliate link
2. You are already a hostgator client
3. You want to build a website which is not G-Rated. – Absolutely no porn, hate or racist sites, etc. If you question whether your site qualifies, email me first.