I recently decided to post a blog for my art and animation, and I’m torn between which to pick. When I read comparrisons, It seems like Wordpress is the way to go. However, I have never seen any artists on wordpress. They’re alwasys on Blogspot. I was wondering why this is. Is Blogspot more art friendly or what?
Blogspot is sort of like the wordpress for dummies (no offense to anyone at all). It’s watered down to make it easier to use, and because of that it lacks functionality. I would recommend using Wordpress especially if you are planning on hosting it yourself.
I use blogspot (meshweaver.blogspot.com), and I have pretty much the same subject…though more towards Blender in general 
I haven’t really looked at Wordpress, only recently found out it was for blogs 
I think Project Durian uses Wordpress…
I use Wordpress as an installation on my own domain right now, but I used to use Blogspot.
Blogspot is great for if you just want a very simple blog to post your artwork, but if you want to customize it at all Wordpress is much nicer it has a really good user interface that lets you play with virtually anything -you can do pretty much anything with it, but yes it does require a little more technical know-how to do certain things.
Everyone says that wordpress allows more customization and whatnot, but I can’t even figure out how to change colors. (I signed up for both for now so I can see the differences.) It looks like I have to choose one of the 99 themes, and whatever it looks like, that’s it. From what I understand, if I want to have that easy customization everyone talks about, I have to go with wordpress.org and have to deal with installing software, and paying for hosting, or hosting it myself (does that mean if my computer isn’t turned on people can’t see my blog because everything is going through my computer?) and all kinds of stuff that I don’t fully understand. Then I wonder, if I’m paying for hosting, why not just have a regular website. Then I wonder what’s the real difference between a regular website and a well put together blog. Then on blogpsot, I still can’t figure some things out as well. Does either have a way where I can have tabs such as “Gallery” “Videos” “Blog” “About” “Contact” or is that sort of thing only available on traditional websites? This is very frustrating.
Double Post
Web hosting does not require you to have your computer on. Web hosting is just the same as signing up for a wordpress blog or blogspot blog on those sites except you’re not limited to using blogging software on the host. You can do (depending on the web host you choose) pretty much anything you want to put on the site.
Now you can get webhosting as a subdomain of an existing hosting site, just like signing up for one of those blog sites where it would be http://webhost.com/yourname or something like that or you can purchase a domain name from a site like http://godaddy.com and have it directed to your web hosted site. The way you get files on to a site that’s hosted is through FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and the entire website will be on a server at the web host’s location and it’ll be their responsibility to keep it up 24/7 etc.
Now, if you want something like a gallery page and a contact page and such that sounds more like a traditional website so it’s going to possibly require some design work unless you can find a pre-existing theme/design somewhere that’s free to use. I’d recommend using Wordpress for that. Wordpress allows you to edit the actual HTML files that make up the blog… there are lots of tutorials on this on wordpress.org so it’s all very do-able, but if you’re unfamiliar with web design or HTML it will be a little time consuming and maybe a bit tough to do.
But if you use wordpress there’s probably many already existing artist type themes that have a gallery page and video page etc. just like you were describing. You could get a theme that has those pages already there and a nice menu and then you’d only have to worry about adjusting the colors if you wanted to (which still takes HTML editing but is a lot less tedious than trying to create the entire theme from scratch)
It’ll look more professional if you have your own domain name and webhost, but obviously since you’re new to all this it might be easier to just start off with a simple blog at wordpress.com.
The one advantage Wordpress has over Blogspot is the ability to create pages as well as posts. So Wordpress allows for the creation of traditional web pages like a Gallery page etc. wheras Blogspot only lets you do blog posts (last I checked)
Anyway, there’s a lot of places you can look for how to guides on setting up a blog or website online I’d recommend googling it and just reading through some of the options.
Hope this helped.
Thank you! That really helps clear things up. I think for the time being, I’ll just focus on my free wordpress.com blog, and I’ll worry about upgrading to wordpress.org with my own domain, or an actual website later once I get a grasp of things, and enough traffic to justify upgrading. I actually found a theme that I was able to tweak just enough that I am content with, and it allows for those tabs like I was asking about.
In case anyone is interested you can check it out here
http://scotchtapeworm3d.wordpress.com/
I’m still new to the whole blogging thing, so right now it’s pretty bare, but I hope to start adding all kinds of stuff such as project breakdowns, and maybe some tutorials.
this might be also an option.
it allows blog, webpage and twitter style following options.
quite a nice system. you can custom edit html pages, add custom css
or even upload your own theme.
wordpress is far better no doubt