Changing Blog Themes: Blogger Vs. Wordpress

At first I didn't like my Blogger blog as much as I did my Wordpress blog. The only reason was because of the limited theme choices that are available within the Blogger site.

I discovered how easy it is to use templates that are available for free out on the internet for Blogger. I find that changing themes is much easier to do on Blogger than on Wordpress. There are a lot of free themes that are available for Blogger. I'm definitely into free. Although, if I really like something and use it a lot, I will send a payment to a software author. I think it's only fair to do this. A little monetary appreciation is always an incentive for someone to keep on creating useful and imaginative work, and it's the right thing to do.

To be fair, though, there are also tons of free themes out there for Wordpress. The comparison I am making here is between the free Blogger and Wordpress hosted sites.

You can do a search for free Blogger templates. There are a lot of them out there. Once you find something you like, and are comfortable that the site you are downloading from is safe, download your file. The file will be in zip format, so you will need to unzip the file to your computer.

Once the file is downloaded and unzipped to your computer, go to your blogger dashboard, choose layout, and then Edit HTML. I would suggest that you download your current full template before you make any changes. This option is given to you on the edit HTML page. That way if you run into a problem you will be able to restore your original template, and not lose your work.

Now that your original template is saved you can begin to upload your new template. Upload the new template file from your hard drive on the edit HTML page. You will choose the file that was extracted to your hard drive when you unzipped your downloaded file. The template file is in .xml format. When the file is uploaded the Blogger upload will ask if you want to install widgets. These will be any of the sidebar or text features that you had on your blog before the upload. If you want to include these, tell the uploader yes.

You will now be able to preview the blog to see how the new template will look. If you are satisfied with the new look, save the template and view your blog. I was thrilled with the template that I found. The default templates are pretty limited on Blogger and I didn't know how easy it was to have a more stylish look for my blog.

I had seen other Blogger blog sites that looked really nice, and didn't know how this was accomplished until I did a little research. I'm finding that I really like Blogger. You can have a cool looking theme and a free blog as well as monetize the site. You can't do that with the free Wordpress blogs at this time. Wordpress does not allow their hosted blogs to be monetized. Although, if you self host a Wordpress blog, you can monetize it.

For me, I find that the free themes for Blogger are quite easy to use. The Wordpress themes are pulled into your blog by an add themes feature. I found that if I pulled in too many themes, it made my blog page run sluggish. I didn't like having to pull in the themes and then previewing them before I installed. It seemed to take a lot of time. I found that the free Blogger themes worked better with the widgets that were previously installed. Not so with Wordpress. I have only found one theme that will work well with all that I have on my blog site. It's just been more difficult with Wordpress. It could be because there are so many widgets that you can download for Wordpress that it can make changing themes difficult. You might not agree, and if so let me know.

Note: Just recently Blogger has changed their template designer. They have upgraded their themes and they look really great. They now offer themes that have a nice design and colors to choose from. You can still, however, use the free themes that are available on the net. In fact you will get much more selection by searching out templates on the internet.

Sources:

Personal Experience