After nearly three years with Blogger, we’re finally going to make the move to Wordpress. We’ve been frustrated for a long time with some of the limitations and lack of features that Blogger has. Yes, it was great they they finally added threaded comments, but permalinks are still a glaring omission. Yes, Blogger is easy to use and relatively simple, but it lacks virtually endless customization potential and drool worthy plugins that Wordpress boasts . But we’ve gotten along fine for the past three years without all those bells and whistles, so why are we moving now?
Because for going on three weeks now the scheduling feature has been broken for countless bloggers and Blogger has yet to even acknowledge it as a known issue. The forums have been flooded with reports, pleas, and bewilderment by Blogger’s complete disregard of this problem and we have had enough.
Everyday this problem persists we are loosing traffic. We understand. Consistency is a huge part of blogging and it’s driving us nuts to see our “scheduled” posts just lying in our Dashboard each day instead of automatically posting like they are supposed to. And we apologize to our readers and to the authors, publicists, and publishers who have had late posts. We thought we were making mistakes at first. Accidentally scheduling posts for PM instead of AM, but it quickly became apparent that we weren’t the problem, Blogger was. And since Blogger has done all of NOTHING to fix this issue, we’re packing our bags. *UPDATE* Blogger has finally rolled out a fix. Let’s hope it works.
We’ve talked about moving to Wordpress someday down the road (and been teasingly bullied by other blogger friends to ‘drink the kool aid’ and come on over to Wordpress for ages now), we didn’t anticipate doing it this soon (especially not since we got our lovely new design), but we’re simply not willing to put up with this problem any more. Honestly, if I had it to do over again, I would have started with Wordpress to begin with.
We’re just now entering into the research stage of the move which means we’re looking at various web hosts, blog designers, and reading tons of tutorials. It’s a lot to consider and since we know so many of you are bloggers who’ve made this move before, we’d love any advice, tips, resources that you could share.
- Did you do the transfer yourself or hire someone?
- Were you able to keep your Blogger theme, rework it, or did you have to get a whole new design?
- If you went with a new design, is there a designer you recommend?
- And pitfalls you can warn us about?
- Any must have plug-ins we should know about?
- Any advice, concerns, or thoughts you want to share?
We want to assure all of our readers that we aren’t going to make this change hastily. We are going to do our due diligence to make sure we don’t loose any of you and that our content remains consistent and accessible. We value you too much to rush this. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to comment or contact us directly. Thank you so much for bearing with us during all this.
