Moving from Blogger to Wordpress. Does It Pay?
Yes! And let me tell you why.
For me the biggest benefit is the easier blog posting tool. Blogger was always dropping my posts or part of posts. Blogger users – you know what I mean! I just couldn’t stand it anymore.
Wordpress has way more functionality. For instance you have more advertising flexibility. You can place adsense and other ads inside your posts more easily. A great plugin for this is Adsense Deluxe. There are a gazillion free plugins to choose from for adding cool things to your blog.
Is it easy?
No. I’ve just spent the last 5 days putting together the whole thing. Courtney Tuttle has an excellent article that walks you through setting up a Wordpress blog. I recommend printing it out and reading it. If you are serious about setting up a professional blog that will serve you and your readers well for the long term, then this is the way to go. The only changeI made was I used ANHosting instead of Prouddomains.com. ANHosting is recommended by Wordpress along with a few others. I like that ANHosting are very responsive to email and I can do an instant chat to get help 24/7. Of course their phone service is 24/7 also. And their install of Wordpress took all of about 5 minutes. The whole time for setting up hosting can take a little longer than that as you will need to update your DNS if your domain is registered elsewhere like mine was.
Where to find Wordpress Themes.
Once your Wordpress is installed on your host, you’ll probably want to customize your template or theme as Wordpress calls them. When you do this you will need to download the theme, then upload it to your server according to the author’s installation instructions. You can either use any FTP program like WS_FTP which you can try for free for 30 days. Or Wordpress recommends Filezilla which is completely free. If you use ANHosting they also have a Control Panel (CPanel) which has FTP capability under the “File Management� link.
Here are some links for places to find Wordpress Themes: (all of these are free)
Alex King’s WordPress Theme Competition Winners
Emily Robbin’s Review of 980 WP Themes
The theme I use is called Tiga.
One Really Important Thing You Need to Know.
For uploading to your hosted server, you may need to turn off your internet security and firewall. I had to learn this the hard way. I spent way too much time trying to figure out why I couldn’t upload files. If you turn it off, turn it back on right after uploading the files.
Plugins and Widgets I am Using
AdsenseDeluxe – helps put adsinside your posts.
FAlbum – can put photos from Flickr on your site.
On this site I use an older version than the latest version because
for some reason it works better on this theme I have. I use version
0.5.6
Wordpress Widgets – this is a must have if you want something that makes arranging your blog layout easy.
Paypal Donate – Allows easy addition of Paypal donate buttons in pages and posts.
WP-Amazon – adds the ability to search and include items from Amazon.com to your WordPress post entries.
Subscribe to Comments 2.1 – allows commenters to check a box requesting email updates to those comments.
Show Top Commenters – shows top commenters on your site. This is one of 7 helpful tips for increasing comments on your site.
Others that I plan to check out and use are listed here by the author of this template I use which is called Tiga.
Is it worth the effort?
Yes. After many hours of updating my widgets and links and searching for the right template, I am finally able to start writing again. At the end of the day we all know that content is king when it comes to developing a quality blog. Hopefully this article was helpful to you. Please subscribe to my blog to receive more articles like this one via email!
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