Enjoying Our DogTipper Move
March 7, 2010 by Paris and John
Filed under Bloggie, For Bloggers
The last few weeks have been incredibly busy ones here as we moved DogTipper from one host to another and switched from a hybrid of Blogger and HTML pages to a WordPress site. It has been a jumbo DIY project but we’re really happy with the results and know we’ll now be able to add new content at a faster rate plus add more interactive features to the site.
Several readers who have followed the move here, on Facebook, and on Twitter, wrote to ask about our choices and what we selected. If you’ve got a blog or site of your own, here’s a rundown of the moves we made:
Irie supervises the site redo.
- We opted to move our hosting from Pair.com to Hostgator.com. DogTipper (plus our travel sites, TexasTripper.com and LoveTripper.com) have been with Pair for years and we loved their hosting but we were looking for a host that offered cPanel with Fantastico to make uploading WordPress (and future upgrades) easy. We purchased a business account with Hostgator.com and so far we’re loving it; cPanel was just as easy to use as we hoped it would be.
- Our next step was to convert our self-hosted Blogger blogs into a format we could use to import into WordPress. (For those who haven’t followed along in this saga, Blogger will no longer be supporting self-hosted, FTP blogs so that’s what nudged us along in this move.) We found some very good tutorials online including “12 Steps to Convert Your Blog from Blogger to WordPress.”
- Once we imported our DogTipper blogs into WordPress, we installed a premium theme. We purchased the “Lifestyles” theme at StudioPress.com then modified from there to use our colors and to highlight the features we wanted on the home page. One reason we liked the Lifestyle theme was because we could use the Featured Content Gallery (the large photos that fade from one to the next just below the navigation bar on the home page.)
- To make it easier to follow us on other sites, we added some great paw-print social media icons from ChethStudios.
- One we had that move done, we started looking for some plugins we needed. (We’ll no doubt be adding some more in the coming weeks…the plugins for WordPress are addictive!) So far, we’ve added All-in-One SEO Pack, Dagon Design Form Mailer, Facebook Share, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, Featured Content Gallery, Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering, Sociable, TweetMeMe, and a WP Contact Form. (Next on the wish list is a tabbed folder so we can add things like recent comments and most popular posts all in one neat spot.)
So now the fun part: enjoying adding content via WordPress’s interface and enjoying increased reader interactivity. It is now SO much easier to comment on DogTipper than it was when we had our Blogger blogs so we hope that brings in many more comments. Also, we’re now able to run our weekly giveaways using the comments section so that’s going to be very nice!
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