Like many bloggers, I started out on blogger.com and, over a period of time, built up some content and added some widgets. But, even from the beginning, I wasn’t really sold on the blogspot.com address. Somehow it didn’t seem like a proper home.So, after mulling it over for several weeks, I took the plunge and decided to purchase a domain and hosting and bring the blog to a new platform. This would give me more control, a better website name, and potentially a better way to track my visitors and assess interest in my content.
So, how did I do it?
The first step was to decide on a host. Being based in Ireland, my preference was for a local company and, having more one than one blog, I also wanted to be able to host more than one site on whatever platform I opted for. I also wanted to be able to purchase and maintain my domains. After a bit of research, I opted for Blacknight and so, over the space of a weekend, I purchased my domains and hosting.
So far, so good. The next step was to set up the blogs and, ideally, to import the content from my previous blogspot sites. Blacknight has a vault of web apps and offers a couple of blogging options inlcuding WordPress and Movabletype. I installed both and played with them before deciding to go with WordPress as it seemed to have more plugins and widgets.
The next step was to choose a template that would accommodate some of the features that are close to my heart like Google Adsense, Google Analytics, a decent archive, and good categorisation and tagging. After a bit of a hunt around, I found a template that seemed to tick the necessary boxes and uploaded it.
Next came the content issue and, to my surprise, my setup provided an Import option that brought all the content across from blogger without any problems whatsoever.
So, within quite a short space of time, I had a domain, a working site, and content.
The next step involved putting in place Google Adsense, Google Analytics and Google Site Verfication. I found plugins for the first two, and the last one just involved putting some code into the ‘head’ section of the site which I did by editing the Header under Appearance from within WordPress. All fairly straighforward.
The final step was tweaking the stylesheet and a bit of HTML editing here and there to change headings, fonts, and so on.
For anyone considering a similar move, I hope this short blog post will be useful. I am not a techie person but not entirely clueless either. From that standpoint, I found the process fairly logical. Yes, I hit a few hitches along the way – like stupidly putting the Google Analytics code from my old site on the new site before realising that I would, of course, need a new code if I wanted to track the traffic from both sites. But hitches like this were relatively few and minor and fairly easy to resolve.
Was the venture worth it? I think so. For a fairly modest financial outlay and about a day’s worth of tweaking, I have a new site with all my original content up and running on my own domain.
