Why Blogger is more popular than WordPress: Ease of Use

by Tom Johnson on Dec 25, 2006
categories: blogging • technical-writing • web-design • wordpress

I've been a devout WordPress follower for some time now, but this past weekend I realized why Blogger is by far the most popular blog platform: usability. While WordPress is really flexible, most users want ease of use more than flexibility. My wife was trying to load pictures onto her blog, but WordPress really fails when it comes to images. You have to pretty much format your images prior to uploading.

I even installed the Chenpress editor to simplify the process, but in comparison to Blogger, the whole picture uploading and publishing process is much more complicated. Blogger will automatically resize a 2 meg photo and put an attractive border and white space around it. Wordpress requires you to do this manually (to add a border by default, you must modify your style sheet, unless your theme automatically has the border set). I think this is a major flaw with WordPress, because graphics are definitely part of the appeal of any blog.

Here's the image manager tool for Blogger:

One very useful tool is the image resizer power toy for Windows. Our camera takes 2 megapixel photos, but once you install the power toy, you can resize the pictures by right-clicking them. The image resizer creates a copy of the image (rather than overwriting it). After uploading the image, I set the width at 400 pixels -- otherwise it could spill outside the borders of the theme.