- Hundreds of attractive themes and templates
- One click editing of your posts literally.
- Stores all kinds of media in your own library – photos, videos, songs.
- Great privacy controls. For e.g. you can share your blogs with only friends or family or both, and share share photos only with family.
- Social Networking features built in. You get a stream of activity updates from your friends/family on Vox (once added to your list). Others who come to my site can also discover my friend’s blogs on Vox.
Why VOx doesn’t work for me.
- Privacy is the main value proposition for bloggers on Vox. Privacy is important but not critical for me in a blogging engine. Besides, friends/family will have to get an account on Vox in order to view my ramblings. This would only make sense if they were active bloggers on VOX.
- Every photo needs to have a label and when it gets embedded into your blog, and its label shows up on your blog. There is no way to edit the photo label, which is really annoying. So every time I have to change the photo label, I have to go to library and delete the photo, and then reload the photo with the correct label from my desktop. How painful!!
Good
- Clean simple look and feel to the blog. User flow with setting up account, selecting look and start publishing is better than VOX.
- More admin tools than VOX to customize your blog site, including settings for publishing, commenting, archiving as well as layouts.
- You get to make money if you want via Google AdSense (i.e. permit Advertizing on your blog ) if you can build enough traffic. Not something that I plan to use, but I feel good using a vendor who shares a portion of money it makes from content created by users like me.
- Recently they have added a lot of interesting options for Gadgets/Widgets to your blog, including Slideshows, showcasing your bloglist, and polling your readers and much more.
- If you want to allow users to comment on your blogs, they have to have a Gmail/google account or an OPenID account (account on any one of sites like Yahoo!, MySpace etc. There is a consortium of websites joining this movement to allow users to have a single identity on web rather than different usernames/password for different sites). The only way to allow someone without a Google or OpenID account to comment on my blogs was to leave “Anonymous” comment. This was rather a BIG Show stopper for me.
- No Media library to store already uploaded photos. I don’t want to be uploading the same photo over and again if I decide to use it in multiple places.
- Allows you to Import/Export existing blogs from popular blogging engines – this is great!
- No need to have a WordPress account to be able to comment. Anyone can comment. And you can moderate the comments for spam. This was really important for me. Of course, if you are paranoid about the whole world reading your entries – you can make blog posts private by assigning them a password and pass it on to users you want to make them accessible. Whereas in VOX and Blogger, in order to read a private blog, a user will need to get an account first before accessing the blogs. I thought this was really neat!
- Has almost all the features of Blogger as well as VOX and much more, including a media libray. The feature list on WordPress is as comprehensive as it can get. While blogger and VOX are good for casual blogging, I think if at some point you get more serious about Blogging, WordPress will give you more flexibility.
- Categorize your blogs – a big win, especially if you post often.
- Far superior customization options – lots of different layout, customizable header etc.
Bad
- Due to the number of features, navigating through it and getting accustomed to it may take time. An average non tech savvy blogger, who just wants to just post from time to time may find it really overwhelming.
- Use experience/flow not very smooth compared to VOX or blogger. I was stumped many times trying to figure out how to get around.
I can still live with all the no-so-good things about WordPress. I think the benefits far outweigh the bad.
I thought I might as well mention Yahoo! Shine while I am talking about picking a blogging engine. Shine is a recently launched service by Yahoo in Late March 2008, following the recent gold rush by consumer internet companies towards women focused sites. It is a blogging site by women for women – a community of women bloggers. You have the ability to post blogs and the editing tools are on par with any of the popular blogging engines, however, unlike other blogging engines you don’t really have ability to customize your page.
There is an editorial team of 7-10 women bloggers (from who’s who of the publishing industry), who write blogs on topics ranging from fashion to beauty, health, parenting, work, finance, relationships, food etc, which get featured on shine. Additionally, there is a huge user base of women who blog on any one of these topics to share it with the community. Tapping into it’s huge Yahoo! network, Shine has reached monthly traffic of about 4 Million unique visitors within a period of just 4 months since its launch.
Given that some of the most popular topics on Shine range from steamy celebrity gossip to sex issues, I don’t think this is the place I would feel comfortable asking all my friends/family to come to read my blogs on a regular basis. Click here and you will know what I am talking about. It’s possible that in future if I decide to write blogs focused on work/career/education issues more relevant for women, I may consider Shine. I will cover Shine in more detail in another post.
