A Move to WordPress - What think you?

I am so fed up with the rampant ugliness (and glitchy aesthetic unpredictability) of my Blogger site that I am seriously considering a move to WordPress.

But there are some things I am uncomfortable about, and I am unsure whether they will be dealbreakers.

  1. You can't use outside widgets (like my beloved LibraryThing widgets) with WordPress.
  2. There seem to be a lot more things (like the ability to edit your template's code) that you have to pay for with WordPress.  This makes me very uncomfortable.  
  3. When I set up a twin site at WordPress to test it out (go take a look and tell me which you prefer), a lot of my posts from Blogger seemed strangely diminished.  For instance, all the embedded videos I had posted had been stripped down to simple links.  Is this something I can easily fix?
I've used WordPress before in my teaching (for class blogs), and it worked really beautifully.  But now that I am so entrenched in the way of things at Blogger, I am strangely reluctant to learn new conventions.  So what say you?  What do you use to blog?  What would you recommend for someone who has no coding literacy and a desire for sleeker aesthetics in her blog? Should I move or stay?

4 Responses so far.

  1. JW says:

    I like the twinned site, altho the font is too small for my aging eyes. But then, I like the old Sycorax style too.

  2. Yeah - this is one of the things that is holding me back from moving to the much more polished WordPress site: you can't edit the fine details of your own page without paying them $15 a year. BOO.

  3. Emilie says:

    The reason that I originally chose WP over blogger is that as a total novice, it was more user-friendly. I was initially frustrated by the lack of flexibility, but I have adopted a you-go-to-war-with-the-army-you-have attitude which has made me much happier. I do ask very little of the site, in part, I think, because all the widgets scare me.

    As for your twinned site, I love the look! But I do also wish the font were a wee bit larger.

    On a completely separate note, I think a seersucker JCrew dress is right at home on the streets of Halifax. JCrew does do seersucker so well...

  4. I know - the font size is making me crazy, but I can't change it without paying annually for the CSS upgrade. I know that part of why the look is so clean by comparison to Blogger is that WordPress DOESN'T give you control over the details (which are as a result in greater harmony with each other than if non-designers were futzing with them), but this is enough to single-handedly put me off the switch. But honestly, Blogger is so glitchy - look at the number of times on this page that the spacing of my posts switches from single to 1.5 - and I have no control over that. Grr.

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