How I changed from Blogger to WordPress (Part 1)

 

If you’ve been over to my blog in the last week or so, or noticed a change in the email format, it’s because I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress!

I’ve wanted to do it for a while. I actually did quite a bit of research on it a little over a year ago. But, I put it on the back burner. I actually started moving things this last January, but it got put on hold again so that I could focus on school. So, last week (the first week out of school for the semester), I got working really hard on it! And when I got everything moved over myself and things were working really well, I was so proud! I was bragging to my husband a little bit and he reminded me that I’ve spent the last 8 months going to school for Web Design, so it should have been easy. Of course! Haha!

So, first, why did I do it?

Well, it wasn’t because all the cool bloggers seem to do it. I really have nothing against Blogger and I often recommend to my friends who start blogs to use Blogger. It’s free, easy to use and works really well. Plus, although one reason that a lot of people seem to like WordPress better is because of the SEO capabilities, I still think that Blogger has a lot to offer in that department. I’ve had several posts go viral and perform really well on search engines while using Blogger.

The real reason that I wanted to move is so that I could have a little bit more control over my blog. With WordPress, I have access to everything! All of the php files, all the archived photos, everything! It does come with a cost – I have to pay for my own hosting. But for me that isn’t too big of a deal because I already had hosting available. My husband has done web design for years and we already have a host and we had room for my blog there. So, the money really wasn’t a factor. But even still, there are some great hosting companies that don’t cost very much – like less than $10 per month.

Now that I’ve moved, there’s still quite a bit of work to do to get things completely set up. I have over 300 posts and none of them came over categorized. I also need to add a feature image for pretty much all of them. So for the next month-ish or so, I’ll be working on that. Once that’s done, it’ll be easier for you to find all of my archived posts. It’s been fun for me to go through some of them and look at how young my kids were! It’s crazy how time flies!

What do you think? Do you like me new logo? That’s one of the things I redesigned myself. I seriously love graphic design!

One thing I did not do myself is the WordPress theme, although I did hack some of the code so that my stuff would work the way I wanted. I bought a theme for $10 from Studio Mommy. It really was such a good deal and it saved me hours and hours worth of work! I’m a pretty big believer in not reinventing the wheel!

I’ve got more to share on my big move; like what plugins I’m using and how I got all of my blogger posts over without losing the permalinks. So, stay tuned! Is there anything specific you want to know about? Leave me a comment and I’ll try to answer in my next post!