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Don’t be scared to make the move!

By February 17, 2012No Comments

For the past month, I’ve been busy building three WordPress sites. All were existing blogs; two from Blogger and the other was a QuickBlogcast blog. Today I can say that two are complete and one is about 80 percent complete. What a process.

I’ve known about WordPress for years but shyed away from it.

Blogger was so easy and my life was busy.

I said I didn’t have time for the steep WordPress learning curve.

Then Blogger had a major outage a few years ago that stirred quite the buzz among the blogging community. Lots’ of people chimed in that for that very reason they self-hosted on WordPress. Never mind any server can go down but I got their point.

Then my friend Margie Clayman left Blogger for WordPress. She said I should make the leap too; I halfway listened. All I could see was long, sleepless nights trying to figure it all out.

A Word About Change
Change can be a really good thing. I was reading more, meeting new people and realized I had endless opportunities in front of me. But I would need to change my online presence. I accepted this fact and started making moves to transfer my biggest blog from Blogger. That meant recovering my domain name which was an experience I won’t soon forget. You can read about it here. But growth and change go hand-in-hand and I was ready for both.

WordPress Favorites
I like WordPress. Didn’t think I would ever hear myself say that but I do. Everyone rants about the great SEO already built into the program but the plugins are what keep me oohing and ahhing.

  • Elegant Themes – Paid themes are worth the money and Elegant Themes is worth every penny. Great support and fast response. Flashmint.com also has great themes too.
  • Google Analyticator – Great plugin to keep up with site stats.
  • Zoho Forums – I use Zoho for CRM and was so happy to see that they built a plugin for WordPress. No no more having to transfer data from one place to another. Mike was extremely helpful and even emailed me back over the weekend from him smartphone. Love. Love. Love.
  • Easy Columns – For me, easiest to use and with great results.
  • Tweet Old Posts – Smart way to keep visitors coming to your site
  • Social Media Widget – Widget that allows others connect with you in social media communities. Every social media network under the sun is available!
  • Simple Social – Sharing Widgets & Icons – Blog readers can share your post on their preferred social media network.

These are just a few; trust me there are thousands of plugins to enhance your site. Some are awesome, some are awful. Still looking for a good YouTube plugin. My video page is currently hosting two plugins because one stopped working. Go figure. So if anyone knows of a good plugin, let me know!

With WordPress you can customize your site, your way.

I’m glad I finally made the move.

It was definitely worth it.

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