Welcome to For Everything There Is A Season; formerly known as Thoughts and Ramblings on Life, Love, and Health! This is my first blog post on a new hosting site, so please bear with me. A couple of people have asked me if I had either given up on my blog or given up on migrating my blog off of Blogger.
Earlier this year, Google made a lot of changes which resulted in changes to how Blogger can be used. All of a sudden, my site became unsecured and I, as the administrator of my blog, couldn’t access several functions in Blogger. It was so frustrating!
I did a TON of research and spent many hours with the Google help department, as well as enlisting help from a tech savvy friend, to no avail. I then realized I needed to find a new hosting platform and start over, while meanwhile trying to preserve ten years of blog entries. I explored several different options and decided to enlist the help of the company, Netcrafted.
Scott at Netcrafted was a godsend to me and he did the actual migration from Blogger to WordPress.org because I am so challenged when it comes to computers, programming, etc., that I knew it would end up being a disaster. It was the best decision I could have made. He was very responsive every step of the way and deserves a medal for dealing with me and all of my questions. He also helped me out with a few tasks that we didn’t even agree on when he outlined what the migration would include. If you ever need help with any WordPress issue such as troubleshooting, malware removal, site transfers, or managed cloud hosting, I highly recommend this business.
The migration has been done for a while. However it has been a steep learning curve customizing the website as it is SO different from Blogger. In a few weeks or months, once I figure out how to deal with a lot of the technical aspects, this will be a good thing because there is a lot more I can do with WordPress and honestly, it’s a much better product.
For the migration, I had to make a lot of decisions and the biggest one was which hosting site I would use. I chose shared hosting through Bluehost. That was the second best decision I made in regards to this process. It’s affordable, easy to use, and the customer support has been outstanding.
I was struggling with figuring out how to properly get certain things installed, like analytics, share buttons, and a backup plan. Bluehost has excellent teaching resources, but many times I would go through the steps and get stuck, oftentimes with tasks that involved my control panel, because like I said, I’m challenged when it comes to technology and there were some issues with the temporary domain I was initially working with. The chat support at Bluehost has been invaluable. I’m not exaggerating when I say that one day, when trying to install a back up system for the blog, I was online with the support team for a total of 4 1/2 hours that day, for ONE issue. Even how I type up and design each post is dramatically different and that involves a learning curve as well.
It’s not all challenging though. I’ve been having some fun with the process and I have to say, I am learning a lot. I have always told people, I love writing, but the blogging? Not so much. I suspect that will change as I get more experience using WordPress. For now, I’m happy to successfully get this first blog post up and hopefully the information I have shared may be helpful to other writers and bloggers out there.
Good for you! I look forward to reading it!
Thank you!