As I said I’d do last week I’ve closed the latest Poll of the Week off because it was beginning to take over my sidebar. I found the results quite interesting. The question asked:
What Blog Platform Do You Use Most?
The results had a few surprises for me. While I was expecting a large showing for WordPress (around 37% of the 1000 respondents) I was intruiged by the large number of ProBlogger readers using the free hosted Blogger.com platform (22.2% – or 222 readers). This figure was almost triple the number of Movable Type Bloggers. Another surprise to me was the large numbers of Blog platforms that I’d never heard of before. By the end of the poll there were 49 options. Thirdly I was interested that 2% of those taking part use some sort of ‘custom made’ blog platform (sometimes even hand coded).
I’ve graphed the results of the top 13 platforms (each had 10 or more responses) and grouped all the ‘others together’. The full results with all the ‘other’ platforms are listed below the fold.
Graphic powered by Keynote (click to enlarge a little).
Full Results
WordPress.org – 371
Blogger.com – 222
Movable Type – 81
Expression Engine – 40
TypePad – 35
WordPress.com – 32
Drupal – 25
Custom Made Blogs – 20
Text Pattern – 17
LiveJournal – 13
Mambo – 11
Nucleus – 11
b2evolution – 10
.Text – 9
Xanga – 9
SquareText – 8
SubText – 7
Geeklog – 7
Blogharbor – 6
DotClear – 6
Serendipity – 5
MySpace – 4
dasblog – 4
Joomla – 4
Pivot – 3
Blogzerk – 3
Typo – 3
Powerful Intentions Community – 3
DotNetNuke – 2
Bitacoras – 2
LivingDot – 2
iblog – 2
Sulekha – 2
xoops – 2
pmachine Pro – 2
Bloggers.it – 2
Tattertools – 2
City Desk – 2
BlogSoft – 1
Rediffblogs – 1
Jroller – 1
Community Server – 1
weblog.ro – 1
dotclear – 1
Blogsite – 1
mojblog – 1
Boast Machine – 1
Blog Drive – 1
Scoop – 1
Seems Blogger is one of the most used. I merely stumbled into using Blogger. Hope it was a good choice for my blog .
[…] As with making any important decision it is worthwhile to take your time with this decision. There are MANY competing blog platforms on the market (check out the results of a poll I did on the platforms ProBlogger readers use to see just some of them). While you can change your blog platform at a later time (many of them have ways of importing and exporting your content later) there are usually some costs associated with such transfers (and I’m not just talking money – ie changing from a free hosted blog service to a self hosted one means changing your domain which has implications on Search Engine traffic etc). I guess all I’m saying is that it’s best not to rush into the first option you find – take your time, do your research and you might find a blog platform that will last you for a long time. Start by answering some of the following questions and you’ll have every chance of getting on the right track: […]
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[…] There are MANY competing blog platforms on the market (check out the results of a poll I did on the platforms ProBlogger readers use to see just some of them). While you can change your blog platform at a later time (many of them […]
Although it crept into the ratings, nobody here seems to be talking about Expression Engine — probably because it costs hard cash up front whilst WP is free. But I’m about to do a full tear-down job on my site and rebuild it from the ground up (hello web standards, bye bye table layouts), with a blog section included, and EE is one of the blogging tools that I’ve been considering.
Having no previous experience of setting up blogs, I bought the book ‘Blog Design Solutions’ by Andy Budd et al., and Expression Engine was one of the four packages that they looked at in detail (Movable Type, WordPress and TextPattern being the others). From what I read, EE looks like a compelling choice, even if it does cost (my site is a business site, so I can justify the expense if it’s the right tool).
Anyone here have any EE experience?
[…] One more thing – for those of you interested in the results from last time I ran this poll (January 2006) here they are. […]
I was planning to use Drupal for my blog at corporateskills.co.uk and looking at this survey WordPress seems more appropriate but I am still confused as I have spent so much time understanding Drupal and now this blog pushed me to change my mind.
Any comments about Drupal people who have been using it do you need WordPress instead of Drupal for a good blog website?
Thanks love ProBlogger Thumbs up man!!!!!
I just started blogging and decided to go with Blogger. The one feature that stood out for me was mobile blogging where I could email my blog from my mobile device and it gets posted automatically, including any pictures I take with my phone as well. I didn’t happen to notice any other blogging sites with that capability. I believe WordPress is working on it though.
Wow that is amazing I think there must be a plugin for word press to do the same. The only thing that attracts me to wordpress is that you can have it running on your own domain and the list of plugins and skins avaialble makes it highly customisable. I also ended up developing a normal website using wordpress cms capability and it is not a blog and functions very well.
But having said that i think as I have the websites up and ready the most important thing about the blog: http://www.corporateskills.co.uk is that you need to have the ability to post remotly otherwise you just cant find time with a regular job to site and write for the website. The only way is during my 1 hour journey to and from work everyday and indeed Blogger offers much more in that area.
Shall keep you posted for any findings for WordPress.
Readers if you already know something please share!
Cheers all from London :)
Wow, I didn’t know there are so many available blogging application to choose from.
Thanks for the info. Me? I’m WP-user. and I host it on my own domain with this and that plugins installed.
I amuses me is that when I use the free version, my new site get indexed on Google so much faster than the one on my own hosting. And is it true that with Blogger you can get higher SERP than WP?
I doubt Google practices discrimination….does it?
Well here is another try for WP looks wonderful and amazing
http://www.maryamalvi.com. But after development and blogging for few days the site lacks traffic and I had to come back again to Pro blogger to learn about getting the blog functional and search able. It seems like a long journey for a site which is known by a bunch of visitors. :( Any ideas for any time frames for a blog to actually start making money from adsense????
I’m using Movable Type 4.1, since day one day! nice poll topic anyway !
Blogger is the most unbelievably unreliable web tool I have ever used. That it should come second in your poll disturbs me greatly. I tried blogging with Blogger years ago when people were already talking about how bad it is. I backed up and deleted the entire body of published messages when I realised that Blogger messes up my formatting settings and deletes posts instead of publishing them.
Well since my last post I have been using WordPress and I have been blown away with the ease of use and customizable functionality of WordPress. I have tested wordpress to work as a proper CMS and believe me its not a blogging platform its a complete and comprehensive CMS.
I used it for my sites http://www.corporateskills.co.uk, http://www.maryamalvi.com, http://www.sherazalvi.com, http://www.rcsolicitor.com
and many more its the best tool if you are doing freelance work as it saves you a lot of time and offer such huge library of plugins and themes that you wont need anything else. I also used it for a ecommerce site and believe me I found an excellent plugin and worked on it to get the functionality out. Now I am moving towards building my own themes and may be plugins God willing.
Cheers all great post by the way this site http://www.problogger.com is also on WordPress. So go for it I would say.
HI!
I am using blogger as my platform. Which is a better platform? WordPress or blogger?
People say that i should change to wordpress but what about my current traffic and links. They will definitely get lost.
Thank you
Charles
http://www.resourcesandmoney.blogspot.com
We use wordpress and couldn’t be happier… its functional and easy to use – 2.5 has a new interface that looks very modern, and publishing for sub-admin levels is completely hassle-free.
I wouldn’t dream of embarking on a long term blogging journey using a 3rd party host like blogger. You need to own a domain, an host it there. It will be worth something to someone someday, and that someone shouldn’t be wordpress.com or google.
I’m curious to know about other free and hosted platforms other than wordpress.com and blogger. Any suggestions people??
Nice timeless post. I’d like to see the breakdown now. It probably looks pretty much the same.
i’m blown away so much to take in, i use blogger but it’s a pain in the arse and my page rank is now null – could even be sandbox…any advice guys …i am not a techie but i understand seo more ( not great just more )
Hurray, Blogspot is number two! Great! Blogspot is the perfect platform for bloggers who short on money but rich in ideas and determination. If I have enough resource to start hosting my own domain, I’ll use wordpress.org for sure.
Anyway Aramis, are you writing articles for human or robots? Forget about page rank, your audience read your contents without ever thinking about your page rank. They don’t care, all they care is the value of your articles, whether your articles help them or not, and that’s it. If you want more advice go to my site and we’ll talk about it. :D
What about Vox? I am sorry to say, that I’d consider using WordPress.org if it didn’t seem so complex to set up. Also, what about transferring a blog (like mine) to another platform. What complications does that present? Is it wise to just keep it on the current platform…. but I’m wondering if Vox will allow me to insert ads, etc.
BloggerGurl – Self-hosted WordPress (.org) is NOT complex to set up. They boast about their 5-minute install, and they walk you through it every step of the way on their site. Failing that, you can always consider hiring someone to do it for you.
Honestly? I’ve been in this business for over 12 years, and your mention of Vox has probably been the 2nd time I’ve ever heard of it. The problem with it (as with any free/freemium blog site) is that despite the fact that they tell you how much control you have, you really have none. Your search engine results depend on what the search engine thinks of Vox.com, not of YOU. It’s unlikely that you can use your own ads anywhere, except MAYBE inside your posts (though I’m not sure of that even). While they offer “hundreds of designs”, you can’t change them or modify the colors or personalize it at all.
This isn’t just against Vox, it’s against any blog platform that you’re not hosting on your own domain and with your own hosting setup. As for transferring though, Vox is so little used that WordPress.org doesn’t even offer automatic import of your blog (for transferring). The best you could do, is IF Vox offers an RSS feed, you could try it that way, but I’m willing to bet that there will be cleanup on each post after the fact.
Is it worth it to switch? A thousand times, yes… even if you have to manually copy every post from Vox to your own site.