I recently converted this blog over to WordPress, hosted on my own hosting account. Why? Well, WordPress is pretty simple to use, and has a ton of plugins and themes available to customize your site. The blog used to live on blogger.com, which was free (I still had to pay for my domain name but the blog was hosted for free). Blogger was customizable to a point, and was pretty easy to use. Blogger is also part of Google, so it was integrated into Google+ and I’m guessing my content was pretty quickly pulled into Google’s search results. However, it’s free, so I am pretty much at the mercy of what Google/Blogger wants to do as far as the features and look of my blog.
So what do I get with WordPress? Besides all of the 3rd party add ons, both free, and that you can buy, it’s installed on a server on a hosting account. I can back it up to my own computers, and if I want to move it to another host, I can do so pretty easily. It’s a lot more “mine” than it used to be. I have more control. And you really have to browse through the WordPress site to see the number of really sharp looking themes available for it to change the look and feel of your site, as well as the plug ins that let you add custom functionality to your site.
How do you set up a WordPress blog? Well, in my case, I already had my domain registered through Creekside Services. For full disclosure, I do get commissions if you follow the link and register a domain or order web hosting. To get started, you search for a domain name. That’s one of the harder parts to do today, because it’s getting harder and harder to find a good domain that isn’t taken. But when you find the domain name you want, put it in your cart. It’s going to cost approximately $10/year. A .com may not cost the same as a .net, or other top level domains, but whatever you get, you have to pay once per year to keep it.
Once you buy the domain, you can also sign up for hosting. Hosting packages start at $4.95 per month. Once you set up your domain and your hosting, under the hosting options you can bring up the software panel. Tell it you want to install WordPress, and it will install it on your site. I’m just giving the overview here, please leave comments if you want to see a full tutorial. If people want to see that I’ll put one together. It’s pretty simple though.
With the site set up, I looked into some services that you can pay to move your content. I ended up moving it myself. This blog is pretty young, and does not have a huge amount of content yet. So I moved it manually and saved myself the money. But if you have a blogger account, with a large amount of content, go through the WordPress plugins, and there are some tools available to do the job for you, or you can hire someone to do the job.
The last thing I needed to do was to customize my site with a logo. WordPress just puts the title of your site on the top of the pages, and I wanted something that looked a little more professional. I crowd sourced it, at designcrowd.com. I put out a request, telling what I wanted to do, and got bids on the job. I ended up hiring Natalie Graham and she put together the logo on this site for me. To contact Natalie, go to nataliegraham.
So I have moved to WordPress. I have more options for customization, more control over my site and it’s content, and so far I’m really glad I made the switch. Leave comments if you want more details, or a full tutorial.