I started my blogging journey over on Blogger. In fact, I had started 3 blogs on Blogger, hoping to be able to share all the facets of my life. (If you’d like to see them, they’re still there.)
My old blogs are:
- Modern Mom’s Life – in which I rambled about mom-isms and raising kiddos
- 2 Talented Daughters – where I followed Emma (and her modelling career) and Rose and the stuff they’re getting into at different ages and stages
- Modern Mom In Kingston – when I stumbled across fun things happening around town I’d post about them here
I struggled, trying to get Blogger to perform they way I wanted it to. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to run three different blogs simultaneously. After some Google research I realized I needed to switch platforms.
I felt that WordPress was going to offer me a nicer, easier to customize, prettier blog layout. I was right – it was definitely the right decision for me to switch from Blogger to WordPress!
The actual changeover
I chose not to import my old content. I did read many articles and threads about how to do it, and it didn’t seem too hard, but I was hoping for a fresh start. There was a slight tags-to-categories issue that I chose not to waste my time on. If I had imported all my older posts it would have created a category for every tag I had on Blogger. I had a zillion* tags there. I didn’t want a zillion* categories here. There was also an option to go into every post I had on Blogger and take the tags out, but again too much work!
Using WordPress I’ve been able to streamline into one blog with various categories. I found this so much better, even when I was only a week into using the WordPress platform.
A few challenges
I had a short foray into the world of WordPress.com, and I started moving my Blogger posts over, but I quickly realized that the features I was hoping to use were still not available to me. A few web searches later I realized that I wanted to get into the self-hosting side of WP.
I was amazingly nervous about trying to launch a new platform. My husband is part of a web hosting business and he already had a page registered in my name. This worked out well when I finally realized that, to do what I wanted, I needed a self-hosted site. A few emails with the company and Bingo! I was able to download WordPress to my site and was off and running.
There are so many themes to choose from once you get into WordPress. I found that a bit overwhelming. I started with one I thought I liked, but then ended up changing again partway through my design process. I’m still fine-tuning and tweaking my site every time I get on here.
I’ve found WordPress to be very user-friendly overall. Also there many sites and forums where questions are answered, and usually very clearly! I went through a phase where I thought I’d like to design WP sites for others, but I don’t have enough time or experience yet. The act of getting the sites up and looking great is very rewarding for me!
Please share your experiences with Blogger or WordPress (or any switches between the two) in my comments; and if you have any fun, useful plugins that make your blogging life easier, I’d love to hear about them too. I’m so happy with my decision to switch from Blogger to WordPress!
~Jess
*zillion is a creative exaggeration of my tag totals.
Leave a Reply