Wordpress Introduction

It's been a chaotic past few days for me, I have just upgraded my major blog NRL News from the Blogger to the Wordpress platform. I have considered this several times before, but never quite had the patience, skill or time.

To make sure I had help, I used GetaFreeLancer.com and posted a project to get someone to help me make the switch. Similar to elance.com, its an outsourcing website where you can get help on virtually any techincal subject or language.

I set a bidding limit between 300-1000 dollars. It was interesting to see the bids, they varied quite wildly. Price was not the only factor, you got to see the bidders rating and review according to other users (similar to the eBay rating system).

In the end, I picked a cheaper developer that still had a fairly respectable rating. In any project, setting the guidelines and goals is always important. I tried hard to nail down my request and make it as clear as possible. The developer got into things pretty quickly, however my only complaint was at times he was hard to get hold of. (Obviously time zones are a factor, but I always tried to make myself available at suitable times to both of us)

Anyway, after a longer than expected tranistion period - the developer eventually got the site up and going. Wordpress successfully imported all the older blogger posts, over 650 of them. While the posts imported successfully, I found that my results in Google (SERPS) don't actually match up to the original post for some reason - Wordpress says document no longer exists.

Some advantages however, I am impressed with the available plug-ins with Wordpress, the SEO Plugin especially is quite cool and makes things easier.

When I took my domain away from the Blogger hosting service, it left my original Blog domain with a matching high PageRank which was quite interesting. So essentially I got a two for one deal - my domain kept a PR4 and the older blogspot.com address got a PR4 too. (I did have a PR5 prior to the transition starting)

I am hoping to use the PR from the blogspot address now to build up PR on the domain itself.

So it's been a long and hard road, but in the end the change was worth it. In addition to a Wordpress platform I am using BlueHost.com which has made things easy and offered an array of other scripts and tools. My forums for example are now possile and totally hosted with my site.

(I am hoping coming back to a more regular posting schedule soon, however I also have over 600 site reviews to do for a specific Smorty project I am involved with! I'm expecting this to keep me quite busy)

Now, back to those reviews! :)