Making the Switch from Blogger to WordPress

Hello, everyone. You may have noticed some big changes on this website recently. Last Thursday, I migrated this site from Google’s Blogger platform to WordPress hosted by Bluehost. Why the change from a free to a paid service? The main reason was the lack of functionality on Blogger. Blogger had no way of categorizing articles and posts and presenting them in easy to access pages or tabs. Indeed, I had to build these pages manually on Blogger, a time-consuming process that also looked less than ideal to you the reader. WordPress, on the other hand, can categorize articles with ease. Not only that, WordPress can present these categorized articles and posts in an attractive manner with both a large thumbnail photograph as well as a snippet of the opening paragraph. This ability to categorize and present articles and posts simply and attractively was a huge selling point for me.

Another big reason for making the switch now was the old domain name. Simply put, the old name, mellomikeswolfcreekcamper.blogspot.com, was outdated. If you’ve been following along, you know that the Wolf Creek truck camper is gone and that I’ve bought another. Not only that, but the focus of this blog has evolved since I first started it in September 2011. From that time, it has grown from a simple off-road and travel blog in my truck camper to one that also includes off-road adventures in my Jeep; truck camper, Jeep, and truck mods; articles on general RV topics; reviews on vehicles and products as well as articles on RV boondocking; emergency preparedness; and health. With all these reasons, the time was right to change the domain name to one that was more accurate, more encompassing, and less restrictive. The new domain name is www.mellomikeadventures.us.

What else can WordPress do? What else does that platform offer? Well, besides better website design options and functionality, WordPress themes just plain looks better and are more modern than Blogger (just one look at the Home page and you’ll see what I mean). In addition, there are plug-ins for almost anything you can imagine including better, more professional looking widgets and marketplace functionality. WordPress is also easier to manage, provides better customer service, and unlike Google’s Blogger, you have complete ownership and control of your website. Finally, WordPress provides better search engine optimization (SEO) than Blogger. Yeah, it sucked having to take down my old site that had 1,043,333 page views, but there’s also no denying that this website can grow even more and at a much quicker rate than Blogger.

Unfortunately, there are a few negatives with making the switch to WordPress. The big one is the loss of the Google Friend Connect Followers. As far as I know, there is no way to migrate that data to wordpress. So, if you were an official follower on the old site you’ll need to register again on this platform. Sorry about that, but that couldn’t be helped. Fortunately, the process of registering here is easier and just takes a few seconds. Just click on the “Register” tab at the top of the webpage and follow the directions. There’s no doubt, that I’ll miss seeing Google’s cluster of smiling faces on this website, but WordPress provides so much more functionality that will make the loss of this and my 1 million page views more palatable. Like before, I also encourage you to follow me through email, RSS, Facebook, and Twitter.

Oh, one more thing. You may noticed some formatting and line spacing issues with some articles and posts. During the process of migrating some formatting was lost, so correcting those articles affected will be needed. I’ve already corrected most, but a few still remain. I’ll get to those gradually over the next few weeks, as time permits.  Thanks.