I have my blog (come website) on the go for a few years now. It all started out as a notebook really for myself and a way of recording certain things so that I could find them easily later.
Over time it has developed into some more that that and it now covers a number of technical how-to type of articles and some of my Oracle User Group (and ACE Director) activities.
It all started out on Blogger that is provided by Google. I've found Blogger really easy to use and to configure into getting something that is semi professional looking (at least it does to me).
All of this happened before WordPress really got going. I've had a look at WordPress from time to time over the years but never really invested enough time into it. Despite, what feels like everyone, saying that WordPress was the bees knees.
About 6 weeks ago I decided to put some solid time into investigating WordPress (about time some of you might say). The challenge for me was how easy would it be to replicate what I had on my blogger hosted website onto WordPress. I have to say it was easy enough.
Now I have 2 blogs / website running in parallel. Currently my blog/website is hosted on Blogger can it can be accessed via my custom domain of www.oralytics.com. The WordPress blog/website can be accessed at oralytics.wordpress.com
As you will see they are very similar to each other. Yes there are some cosmetic differences but all the content is the same.
What I'm going to do is to run these two environments in parallel for the next (maybe) 6 to 8 weeks. At some point I will switch over my domain name (www.oralytics.com) to point at the WordPress site. And then I might switch it back.
The big question for me to answer is to which one of these 2 environments will become my main site.
Blogger is FREE.
WordPress is FREE, well it is if I use the WordPress.com site.
But if I use the WordPress.com site then I get this annoying banner at the bottom of the browser window that does some advertising for WordPress and the Theme that I'm using.
The alternative to this where I do not get any of these adverts appearing is to pay for Hosting and to pay for a theme. Over a 3 year period that comes out at about $300+. The cheapest WordPress hosting that I could find, at the moment, is with GoDaddy.
What do you think I should do?
1. Stay with what I have on Blogger (www.oralytics.com) (Free)
2. Switch to the Free WordPress.com option (oralytics.wordpress.com) (Free)
3. Buy WordPress hosting and pay for a theme. (Costs $)
When I put out my original enquiry a few weeks ago lots of people came back with really good advice. In particular I wanted to mention Jeff Smyth, Tim Hall and Martin Widlake for the advice, help and suggestions, which I think lots of others found very useful.
It sounds like you have doubts, and if in doubt, do nowt! :)
ReplyDeleteBy the sound of the emails I'm getting from Google, they are developing a new CMS as we speak. Not sure if this will replace blogger or run as a separate thing. You might jump ship, only to want to move back if what they produce is good? Unless you ave a convincing argument to move, don't.
Nothing wrong with blogger. By the way, you've mangled your link to Wordpress. :)
Cheers
Tim...
PS. If you do decide to move, keep the old blog running, but include a canonical link to the new posts, if you can, so search engines know the pages have moved...
Thanks Tim. Interesting news that google might be working on something new. Let's see what happens with it.
ReplyDeleteYou are right that I have some doubts. WordPress is indeed very powerful and there is lots and lots that you can do with it. But do I really need to do all of those things. Perhaps not.
So is the extracts that I would get with WordPress be worth the money versus blogger. I don't think so. At the moment.
I am going to run the two blogs/websites in parallel and perhaps look at switching the domain from one to the other. I'm in no real rush to move so I'll see how things go.
PS: I'm not sure what happened with those links. I'm using the new version of MarsEdit and I'm wondering if it is a new feature in it. Or maybe I just did something wrong.