The Blogger vs. WordPress Theme Markets

Some will argue that WordPress themes can become extremely powerful due to the framework they have been built upon – either custom or utilizing the framework within WordPress. There are other people who are fans of Blogger who will say something similar along the lines of Blogger is free (no hosting/domain required), so you have to expect the themes to also be less advanced than the platform, although the system doesn’t require updating and includes everything you need “out of the box.”

I will not be going into much detail on the frameworks powering either platform, nor the pure markets that have existed for some time, but I will be taking a look at the themes currently available for WordPress and Blogger users.

WordPress Themes

The types of themes that most WordPress users were using five years ago are the themes Blogger users have installed today. Of course, there are exceptions to this, like quite a bit of the themes within the Themes Directory, but we won’t even go there with this.

Starting out with minimalism in mind, as it was some six years ago that WordPress was launched, the themes generally didn’t even have sidebars enabled. You had to “physically” edit what was contained within the sidebar. With that behind us, 99% of all themes created today have widgets enabled and there are typically options contained within themes that allow us to switch between two or three columns, and it is easy to configure the main look of the themes.

With each major release of WordPress (WordPress 2.3 to 2.5, specifically), new features were added, “forcing” designers to upgrade their designs, otherwise people would just look for themes with the features that they wanted. For example, with threaded comments, Gravatars, photo galleries, and other common features, it was essential for designers and developers to focus on incorporating the main features.

Users guide the direction of WordPress themes. The number of downloads or purchases helps dictate how many themes are released and what they contain.
New features are added to the core system at regular intervals.
Users wanted to have more choice – it’s likely one of the reasons you’ve moved away from TypePad, WordPress.com, or Blogger to WordPress.org.
WordPress grew in popularity, and more mainstream sites began using it to power their entire site.

Things also changed within the web development/design space. 2003 (when the beginning stages of WordPress were founded), most sites consisted of a single main column of text, and only a few sites really had much content within the sidebar. News sites became popular for their new magazine/news format, which led to the expansion of people who wanted to publish a similar amount of content on their site.

Before this, if you wanted to showcase a lot of content on your main page, you would have had to use a custom installation of a CMS system, as well as a theme that was completely custom – few mass-sold themes were available at this time.

What ultimately happened was: more powerful themes came to the average user, and we now have a wide selection of themes that can be used for a nominal fee or for absolutely no cost, which have advanced features and settings.

Blogger

It is more difficult to look at the evolution of Blogger compared to WordPress, but there are clear differences between the two systems. You can start using Blogger and use 90% of the themes on the market (as long as you are using the new system), compared to WordPress where that might be 60% due to the large number of premium/commercial themes now available.

There are fifteen Blogger templates on ThemeForest, compared to 386 WordPress themes. It’s not necessarily due to popularity. Although the self-hosted version of WordPress is powering well over 250 million blogs worldwide, it is difficult to purely compare Blogger with WordPress (both versions) in terms of installed and active users, as well as by how much traffic each receives. More than 4.5 million (as of late 2008) blogs reside on WordPress.com, since launching in 2005.

The only way to judge popularity is that Blogger.com receives more traffic than WordPress.com and WordPress.org’s traffic is remarkably low.

What is really helping Blogger get any further in the race for the “best” blog platform? Not much, honestly. The system has been playing catch-up recently, trying to imitate some of the features that WordPress has had for quite some time. The amount of space, media management, page management, and back-end management is extremely limited with Blogger, and even with the most advanced themes, it is a hassle to edit anything.

Feature-to-feature, even WordPress.com (other than the CSS editing feature) far outpace what Blogger has ever offered. The interface is what bloggers are looking for to be improved. Blogger needs to evolve, and with it, a lot of time and effort will need to be put into the “open” system to make it more closed and controlled.

Anyone can create a theme for Blogger.com, while WordPress.com is controlled. WordPress.org is open, as you are hosting your site yourself, although you could run into more problems than with any controlled system. The same back-end panel for Blogger has been in use for quite a number of years (at least three, if not more), and this is outdated, compared to the rapidly-evolving WordPress back-end. Managing plugins and widgets is far easier in both versions of WordPress (minus plugins in the managed version, of course).

Themes created for Blogger are simply trying to imitate what WordPress has been offering for a long time. Magazine themes aren’t really a possibility with Blogger. I’ve tried them, and they’re so painful to setup that it simply shouldn’t be done unless you have a few hours to setup and customize your theme for the first time. Most bloggers simply don’t have this time. Magazine themes for WordPress can have a theme panel to customize and implement a new logo, change the layout, and customize the overall look. With Blogger, you have a ridiculous modules panel and an HTML/CSS panel that are outdated.

Both platforms have their limitations, but what is true from what the market has been delivering is that WordPress is the preferred platform in terms of customization of themes and the look of your theme, while Blogger has been designed as an introduction to customizing a template. WordPress.com is for people who want to write, rather than focus on advertising or the look of their site. It also serves as a great interface for getting to know the self-hosted version for future use.

Through this surface analysis of the main themes markets, you can see where we are going and where things have come. We still have a long way to go before we see the drag-and-drop flexibility that newer platforms have begun offering, but it certainly is a great start, considering it’s “only” been six years since the first version of WordPress/Google purchased Blogger.