WordPress has a cultish following for a reason (credit: Eric M Martin)

If you’re planning to start a blog, grow a blog or use a blog to (gasp!) generate revenue for yourself or your business, you’ll inevitably bump into this question: What platform?

The answer isn’t straightforward, as the market is cluttered with free blog platforms, and “social” platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have some cross-over with their purebred blogging cousins.

For what it’s worth, I thought I’d share my rationale for and experience with switching from a cloud-hosted Blogger blog to a hosted WordPress blog. Since the choice of a blogging platform can be quite personal, I encourage you to do your own research, and use my experience as just one piece of evidence for your decision—although perhaps the one that pushes you over the edge.

So why the move? Here are the four reasons I decided to switch:

1. Blogger doesn’t adapt to a demanding blogger’s needs (or, at least, mine). This was probably the biggest issue that I faced. As anyone who works in technology—or who simply lives in the 21st century—knows, the bit-based technology landscape changes rapidly. I found that Blogger simply didn’t keep up. To me, the interface wasn’t user-friendly (surprising for a Google product), the features added weren’t those I wanted (for example, blog-following functionality on the home page, a feature for which I already used Google Reader and thereby did little for me), and the features that I wanted (for example, a dedicated iPhone application) weren’t offered—and generally didn’t seem to be a priority. Blogger’s mobile version, for example, appears to be an afterthought. WordPress offers a dedicated iPhone application that makes mobile blogging—an increasingly attractive activity given the proliferation of smart phones and netbooks—a breeze.
2. WordPress’s crowdsourcing from a mature user community has unleashed a barrage of useful themes and plugins, broad support, and relentless innovation. If you want your WordPress blog to do something, there’s a good chance that someone’s already built the plugin.  If not, there’s a good chance that you, or someone with more advanced PHP skills, can do it with the extensive support and documentation available online. Blogger has widgets, but the selection is limited, as it is for themes. As I post this, my WordPress blog uses a customized free theme and cool plugins enabling such useful functions as Google Analytics integration. Even Blogger, which is a Google product, doesn’t offer the sophistication of Analytics integration allowed by WordPress’s extensible architecture and developed by its active community.
3. WordPress offers sophisticated yet easy-to-use content management functions as well as blogging functions. In fact, WordPress to me is one of the best lightweight content management systems on the market, despite starting as a blogging platform. I’ve used several more expensive systems (which, to be honest, isn’t hard, since WordPress is free), and few can compete with WordPress’s out-of-the-box balance of ease of use and robustness. Similarly, I’ve used free platforms such as DotNetNuke and Drupal, and taken behind-the-scenes tours of Joomla. I’d rank WordPress far above them all in terms of setup, performance, user-friendliness, expandability—just about everything you’d want. In fact, I’ve been so impressed by WordPress that I’ve evangelized within my internet optimization company, Commune, and it’s currently our platform of choice for many client projects.
4. WordPress is a category leader. In business and life, I’ve learned from smart people to hitch your prospects to stars. Commit to only hiring, partnering with, working with and befriending stars, and you’ll dramatically impact your performance (not to mention your happiness, as stars tend to be positive personalities as well as influences). As a category leader, WordPress is a star, and using it for your personal or business blogging allows you to raise your prospects as the platform expands.

All of this said, WordPress isn’t for everyone. In particular, I should note that I’m using a hosted version of WordPress, despite generally being a huge proponent and user of cloud-based, software-as-a-service applications such as Google Apps and Salesforce. You can get a blog on WordPress.com, but it’s more limited than what you get by downloading and installing WordPress on your own server. The main reason not to move to WordPress on your own server is simply that it’s more technically daunting than just continuing to bang away on Blogger. A move from Blogger to a WordPress.com blog offers some benefits, such as more sophisticated content management, but nowhere near the benefits of  switching to a WordPress blog on your own server.

WordPress is a category leader, as shown in this Google Trends report

As for the transition itself? It was ridiculously easy. These days, many hosting companies offer one-click WordPress install (another advantage of aligning with a category leader), on packages that start at around $5 a month. WordPress itself now offers one-click upgrading, so there’s no need to FTP files or manually update a database. And WordPress offers an easy-to-use Blogger import function that worked flawlessly. (The only downside was that it imported Blogger tags as categories, which was easy to remedy with WordPress’s “categories to tags” functionality.)

So, all in all, here’s the bottom line: If you’re a beginner blogger or don’t need sophisticated features, stick with Blogger. But if you’re a demanding blogger or have aspirations to grow business through blogging, consider setting up a server and hosting your own instance of WordPress. It’s a bit more work, but well worth it.