The journey to WordPress

I’ve been here at my new site for a few weeks and have been smoothing out the wrinkles in this transition. So far, I’m loving WordPress and am glad that I made the switch. My decision to leave Blogger was two-pronged. First, my computer was experiencing a lot of technical difficulties with Blogger. Secondly, I liked the idea of actually owning my own slice of the Internet (unlike Blogger which is ultimately owned by Google). I didn’t do too much research before my site design was finished, and I kind of wished I had. Once Jane and Fran had everything up and running, I was all of a sudden scrambling to figure out how to use WordPress. I spent a lot of time searching the Interwebs for helpful tips and tutorials. I included the main ones I used below.

Self hosting is essentially owning your own domain and website. You purchase the domain through a hosting service then choose a way to publish your posts. I use BlueHost. Tutorial here.

WordPress platform. WordPress has several different platforms (designs or templates) that you can install. Each has different bells and whistles and just gives options for the visual look of your site. I use the Genesis platform.

Importing Blogger. Thankfully, WordPress makes the transition from Blogger pretty easy. They have a tool that imports your posts, drafts, and comments. You do have to create new pages.

Plug-ins are fancy schmancy apps that improve your WordPress site. Some of my plug-ins: Recipe card (creates a recipe card that can be saved and printed), Disqus (comments), Google Analytics (site statistics), Blogger Importer, Watermark (for photos), and Hover Pin-It (floating pin button).

Redirection of old material. Once you have a new site up and running, you want your old site to send your readers to your new site. I check my Blogger account regularly, and I still have dozens of page views there each day.

Updating
Pinterest: If you pinned anything from your old site, you either need to redirect the original page to the new site page or you can manually update the pin link on Pinterest. I chose to update each pin’s link.

Photos: Depending on their size, your photos might not have transitioned to your new site. It is very tedious, but I went through each post and updated any photos that were too big or too small. WordPress has an “edit post” option on each page, so you can open new tabs to update these easily.