A Blogger’s Confusion: Why WordPress isn’t better than sex
I like nail art. I like SEO. So I decided to merge the two and start a blog. I’ve said before that I in my opinion, bloggers can often be annoying and/or pretentious but here I am willingly entering the “blogosphere”.
After working in SEO for a few months, I started to think “blogging? Easy, I can do this”, but I just wasn’t sure what to write about. My life isn’t particularly exciting so I couldn’t really talk about myself and what I get up to.
Being in the male-dominated world of SEO, sometimes it’s easy to forget that I am actually a girl, and yes, I do love hair and makeup and gossiping about Lauren Goodger from TOWIE. I’ve had a thing about crazy DIY nail art for some time now, so I decided to ignore the misogynist jibes from my all-male team and set up a nail art blog.
I knew that WordPress is usually the obvious starting point if you want to take blogging seriously, but after noticing that 90% of my favourite beauty blogs were running on Blogger, I announced to the boys in the office that Blogger was going to be my choice of CMS. They looked at me like I had three heads. “That’s stupid!” they cried, “Wordpress is the better than sex” (I might have exaggerated that last one). I protested that anyone who’s anyone is using Blogger, and carried on with my plans.
So, along I went for a few weeks, doing my thing, slowly gaining a small following, sharing new ideas with my new “Google Friends” (I even received a new-comer award, get in!) and generally enjoying being a blogger.
Then I got addicted. I’d get up at 6am and check how many re-pins I’d got on Pinterest. I’d look at Google Analytics ten times a day. I wanted to take over the world with nail art domination. I got serious – I bought the domain and some “proper” hosting. I got serious about blogging. I moved over to the dark side – WordPress. Uh-oh.
Now, I’m not the most tech savvy person in the world, but I thought these new developments would be a great learning experience, as website design is something I’ve always wanted to get into but kept putting off. With the help of Kun, I decided on a WordPress theme and decided to start over, this time with better photos and a sleeker look.
That was three weeks ago. I’ve managed to get some content up but I feel like something is lacking. Compared to the old Blogger site, the new one is definitely better looking, but instead of interacting with my fellow nail art fans in my spare time, I’m now finding myself tinkering with layouts and footers and menus and that damned “featured image” issue that I can’t seem to resolve.
I know, I know, it’s not all bad – I’m definitely learning more useful information with the WordPress site – things I wouldn’t be dealing with if I’d continued with Blogger. And with frustration, comes eventual knowledge so I’m happy with that aspect of things, after all, I started a blog with the intention of learning more about SEO in a real-life example that I could control. Looking at it in that aspect, WordPress is definitely superior.
But what about my fellow beauty bloggers? The sharing and caring? The community! My Saturday afternoons are no longer spent coming up with nail designs and sharing my work – all I seem to think about is how to fix the problems I keep encountering on the blog, which incidentally is now more like a website. My online self suddenly feels almost isolated.
Hopefully in a few weeks, I’ll have sorted out these initial teething problems and I’ll look back at this post and laugh. But despite what the guys in the office say, I don’t think Blogger is completely redundant. It’s definitely got its place in the beauty blogging world (insert sexist joke about girls being rubbish with computers here) and sometimes you have to sacrifice a fancy website for easily shareable content within certain communities.
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