Last week I took the plunge and made the switch from Blogger to a Wordpress blog hosted on my own domain. So far it has been a lot less daunting than I expected as Adam smoothed the way by answering any questions I had about the process. Having someone on hand to deal with specific problems is the best help of all.

There were several reasons behind making the switch. I wanted to have my own domain to play around with, something I've been without since the turn of the century. I know I could use Blogger on my own domain but I wanted greater flexibility than Blogger was offering and my first impressions of Wordpress have been good.

The process was as follows:

1. Buy a domain (I used 123-reg).

2. Sign-up for hosting (Adam recommended 5quidhost; they seem good so far, I just have a free account to test things out and was able to do a one-click installation of Wordpress. Once my site is properly setup I can upgrade my account. Perfect for experimenting without too much commitment).

3. Import my old posts from my blogspot domain. This was the bit I was worried about but it went smoothly and everything, including comments came across. If you have photos uploaded to Blogger then you'll need to copy these across manually. Most of mine were okay as I'd been linking to my flickr account when I included photos in my blog posts.

4. Choose a theme. I went for Tranquility White by Roy Tanck as I wanted something minimal that I could play around with if I wanted to. Great work Roy!

5. Activate various plugins and widgets to do stuff on the blog. Akismet to stop comment spam, Collapsing Archives and Collapsing Categories, both by Robert Felty. Still fiddling with these to see what looks best.

... and we're done!

1 original comment:

Hey Mark, nice one. Looks like it was a lot more painless than our switch, although our problems weren’t 5quidhost’s fault.
Like the new theme, too.
Comment by handolio — 12 April, 2008 @ 1:20 pm