Top 5 Reasons WordPress.Com Blogs Suck

1. No Template Control: WordPress does not give free account holders access to their templates. They give you a handful of varying styles to choose from and that’s it. Users have very limited control over what their blogs look like.

They do allow users to use some very basic coding in the sidebars and posts, but without full control over the templates every blog looks almost exactly the same. It’s like we’re all using the same cookie cutters, but have different colored icing.

There isn’t even access to create an individualized banner heading. All that can be added is text. No graphics, just boring.

2. No Java: Free WordPress users can kiss sophisticated coding goodbye. Man, I aint even a tech geek, and this pisses me off. I don’t know Java coding, but there are a few cool widgets out there that do and I can’t add them because WordPress blocks it.

3. No Embedding: This is a Youtube world, but if you’d like to imbed your favorite video into your blog, you’d better not have a free WordPress account. They won’t allow it. The few times I’ve wanted to show my readers a video, I’ve had to capture a couple of pictures and link to the Youtube page direct.

4. Only Ten Widgets Allowed: The almighty WordPress gods have give us users a little bit of control with some widget space on the sidebars. Except as mentioned before it doesn’t accept complicated coding, only basic HTML. And they only give you ten boxes to do it in.

Now admittedly, you can add multiple codes into each box, but it is still extremely limiting the ability of users to create their own space.

5. No Decent Stat Counters Allowed: WordPress includes its own stat counter, but it only tracks page views, not unique visitors. Who the crap only wants page views? I need to know how many actual visitors I have. And while they keep tabs on things like where your visitors are coming from and search terms they used to get their they only present the last ten or so. To get a full idea of your stats you’d have to log your stats every ten minutes or so all day long.

As the final straw in their suckiness, they also don’t allow outside stat counters to keep track of everything. About all you can capture from outside counters is page views and unique visitors. That’s a little more beneficial than the crappy WordPress version, but they won’t allow outsiders to track where your visitors are coming from.

I realize this is free software, and I shouldn’t expect the moon, but the things I’ve just outlined are very basic ideas that wouldn’t jeopardize the integrity of their free space, and it doesn’t seem like these things would be that expensive either.

Blogger enables pretty much all of those things. In fact the only reason I switched to WordPress in the first place was due to Blogger not having any categorization of posts. Which, in their updated version, they do carry. If I wasn’t in preparation of buying my own web host, I’d dump WordPress in a minute.