Scot's Blogger vs Wordpress
by Scot Ranney
Blogging about your products is one of the easiest marketing strategies you have.
The only question is, how do you want to do it?
Scot's Blogger and CMS has you covered. No doubt you will talk to developers who will be quite convincing in their arguments for using Wordpress. Don't be fooled by this. There are very few reasons why any Miva Merchant store needs Wordpress, and many reasons why a store owner should not use Wordpress.
What it really boils down to is security, ease of installation, how it integrates into your store, eCommerce features, and cost.
Scot's Blogger | Wordpress | |
| Installation | Scot's Blogger is a module made for Miva Merchant. You install the module and templates in a few minutes. When you update global parts of your store like the nav bar or footer, you don't have to do anything to Scot's Blogger. | You need a custom theme which is a time consuming and expensive headache. It can take months and thousands of dollars to get the theme to look and feel like your store. If you make any changes to your store, your Wordpress theme has to be updated, again, at more cost. Any updates to your header, footer, CSS, or other global items in your store has to be repeated in your Wordpress theme or customers will think it's a different site when they read a post. |
| Security | Scot's Blogger is as secure as your Miva Merchant store because it's part of your store. You don't have to worry about anything. | WordPress is coded in PHP which is a non-compiled language and is vulnerable to hacking. In fact, vulnerabilities are found on a daily basis. Do a search for "Wordpress exploits" to if you want to be sufficiently terrified. Hackers find vulnerabilities in Wordpress all the time, and until the developers fix it, your store is at risk. If any of those often anonymous developers are unsavory, they could also put back doors in their plugins which puts your site and your Miva Merchant data at risk. You will need a lot of plugins help Wordpress act like Miva Merchant which means a lot of possibly exploits into your system. Plugins for WordPress are coded in PHP which means any bug in any plugin can be exploited which also makes your store vulnerable to hacking. |
| Integration | Your store functions without any extra work. Searching for products, the shopping cart, checkout, wish lists, readytheme content sections, every aspect of your store is right there. Scot's Blogger is part of your store. | Wordpress does not integrate with your store. Period. Everything has to be "pulled" in and taped together. It's like using colored tape to paint a house. Rarely will you see a Miva Merchant wordpress integration look exactly like the store. Most store owners give up and say, "It looks close enough." However, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Wordpress accounts and Miva Merchant accounts are two different things. If someone creates a wordpress account in your blog pages and then goes to your store, they have to create another account. If someone adds products to their cart in your store then goes to read a blog post in Wordpress, there is no way for them to checkout until they go back into your store. Want a mini-basket in your Wordpress pages or someone to add a product you're blogging about to their cart? Forget it. A Wordpress developer will create your theme, and then you must hire a Miva developer to create hooks for all the dynamic Miva Merchant items like logins, carts, related products, readytheme content, any of that. The costs just keep adding up. |
| Comments | Your customers create one store account to leave comments (or you can set it for anonymous comments.) | When your customers comment on Wordpress posts, they need two accounts. One for your store to buy products, the other for Wordpress to leave comments. |
| Plugins & Customization | Scot's Blogger updates are an email away, and your developer knows Miva Merchant inside and out. Do you like a certain Wordpress plugin? Just ask and we'll make it happen in Scot's Blogger. | You will pay your Wordpress developer to create a lot of plugins. These are used to display products and do everything else that is built into your Miva store. Wordpress developers, many of them in overseas coding group, often know nothing about Miva Merchant and often cause more harm than good. |
| Cost | Pay for the module license. That's it. | It can cost thousands of dollars to get your Wordpress theme the way you want it. Once your Wordpress theme is up and running, be ready to create a monthly budget to keep your theme updated to reflect store changes. Every time you change something in your store, you need to pay your Wordpress developer to keep things in Wordpress updated. It never ends. |
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