Some time ago I decided that I should move Inside Out Style from blogger to wordpress. Partly because the templates look more professional (I bought mine from www.studiopress.com) but also because I’d been thinking about including a forum for some time, and wordpress gives you way more options with things like this than blogger.
One of the resources I found useful when moving was from The Mama Blog - written in non-technical language, unlike some of the ‘helpful’ articles I came across when doing research on figuring out what I had to do. The other one looked at was this.
I’m not a techie – most other image consultants seem to think I am, but really I’m not, and I can tell you the whole trying to keep permalinks (and I never knew what they were before I moved my blog and had never thought about them before – and if you don’t know, they’re the end of the URL that is the name of each post) the same so that all the links into my blog didn’t disappear was just one of the issues that I don’t think I’ve completely resolved, but I did follow the advice on The Mama Blog which certainly helped.
One of the pitfalls I hadn’t realised that even though I had my own URL, Google gives you unlimited bandwidth and as I didn’t realize how much bandwidth I used per month I had to move my blog twice, to an unlimited bandwidth plan. I’ve ended up on Bluehost.
I also managed to completely stuff up my Feedburner feed and lose all my Feedburner followers… so if you’re one of those I’d love you to re-follow! That was another issue I didn’t manage to avoid. Oh well, too late now.
The WordPress Plugins I’ve Installed that I love
Calendar – this makes scheduling posts so easy and it’s great for creating a plan of posts.
Youtuber – makes adding in videos from You Tube a snatch
Linked IMG – brought all my images across from Blogger
Shareaholic – to help people share my content across lots of social media platforms
XML Sitemap – to create a blog sitemap
Multicons – create a little favicon icon that is on the browser tab next to the name of your site
So all you other WordPress users – what are you favorite plugins? Can you share any tips for anyone else thinking of moving their blog?