How to survive the upheaval of changing from Blogger (Blogspot) to WordPress.

Be prepared for a hell of a lot of hard work, things not working correctly and basically everything going wrong.  Also make sure you have everything in place and tested before you tell your readers about the new site.  I told my readers far too early, which led to all kinds of catastrophes and it may take quite a while to build up my reader network again.

For now though, here is what I have learnt:

Lesson Number One

Don’t run with the first theme you find, try some out, add posts to them for a while and see how it works

The first WordPress theme I used was a free theme from WOO Themes.  I thought that the exciting front end would work well for the site, allowing me to categorise posts left, right and centre.  I then discovered the plugins library for WordPress, which is full of easily installable widgets.  This is where my problems really came in.

Lesson Number Two

Use a theme that gives you a bit of room to customize, in my old theme I was unable to edit much on the sidebar, which is a great place for bloggers to add tools for readers.

Ultimately though the theme was too business like, it didn’t really feel like a blog and it detracted from the storyline way of viewing the site.  I still needed a theme that would allow people to be able to look through the categories as lovley drop down menu’s (which you can do above).

I found brilliant theme that ticked all the boxes, downloaded it, unpacked it (you will need Winzip or similar) and off I went.  Here I encountered my first error, the stylesheet appeared to be missing!

I went back through the files and found the stylesheet, tried reuploading it and then went thourgh the whole process about three times, until I realised what I had done -

Lesson Number Three

Always make sure that any theme, plugins, widgets or whatever else is designed to work with your version of WordPress, if it isn’t then you could waste hours of valuable blogging time!

I finally found a theme (the current one I am using), made  a number of changes to it and am now back to blogging.  If I look back I now realise that I should have been a lot more patient, actually waiting until I had the site completely set up before changing all my links across.

Speakling of links, I had expected to be able to do a simple 301 redirect from my old blogspot address.  I assumed this was possible, well, I assumed wrongly!  I have now tried a number of redirects from my old blogspot address, none of them really work, and those that do get Blogger breathing down your neck and calling you a spammer!

P.S. If any one knows of a good one that works then please let me know!

Lesson Number Four

Don’t assume things will work, Google them and try them out first.  This will save a lot of disappointment and re-thinks at the later stages.

So after all that do I still think that the change was worth it?

Well yes, mainly because I was able to do a good deal with ITSimple.co.uk for hosting etc. But even without that I do really enjoy the awesome and powerful features of WordPress and it’s plugins.  I shall be here for a very long time ladies and gentlemen so no need to update your bookmarks anytime soon. (Famous last words)

So what about you – where and what is your blog based on, what features do you think would really benefit a blogger? And what could we all do without? And should Blogger allow a simple re-direct feature?

VersatilityLiteScreenshot