Benefits and shortcomings of Blogger

As part of our series on setting up your own blog, we look at the advantages of free blog services and paid blog services. One popular free blog service is Blogger, owned by Google. We've created lots of blogs using Blogger so here, in a nutshell, are the main benefits and shortcomings of the system.

Benefits of blogger

1. It gets indexed by Google
Your first blog post (and probably the first few) are highly likely to be indexed by Google. This means that they appear in a Google Blogs search, appear in keyword alerts and will rank somewhere on the main search engines. This is rewarding but also particularly useful if you're trying to get noticed by a company, charity or particular person.

2. It requires no other knowledge
You need know knowledge of html. That's broadly true of some other services as well but I don't know any that require as little knowledge as blogger, but give you as many opportunities to edit the html if you wish.

3. It's easy to do everything you need
It's easy to link, to upload photos and video and manage comments.

4. Use your own URL
You can ues your own URL within the blogger system.

5. Comment registration is easy
Lots of people have Google accounts. Which means that you can have comment registration or moderation without putting people off by a registration process.

Weaknesses of blogger

1. The designs are poor
Most of the readily available design template on Blogger are poor in our experience. They look like a template (in the same way that Office templates are very obvious) and they aren't very flexible. Yes you can add plugins, but not with the same ease as wordpress. Moreover, most of the popular designs fail the w3c test.

2. The plugins are limited
The plugins and added extras associated with Blogger are ok but not great. There isn't the same volume of support or peer-reviewed added extras.

3. Controlling URLs is harder
Knowing your post name is important. If it contains keywords, it helps users and search engines follow the link. Superficially, this is easier on Google. However, it's harder to ensure search engines don't get confused by keyword tag links and archive post links.

Please use the comments section to add any more advice.