Have you noticed the new functionality?

Written Words has moved from the worthy Blogger platform to WordPress. Along with that, as you can see, it sports a new, cleaner look and new functionality. I like the white space, the categories for blog posts and the ability to search through the blog. I hope you do, too.

Why make the change?

The most important difference now is, the Written Words blog is an integral part of my revamped Written Word Communications Company website, writtenword.ca. Since I started the blog years ago—in 2006!—I have wanted to integrate into the website. But mostly because i wasn’t willing to invest the time into figuring out how, I never did—until now.

A couple of months ago, I began an effort to update the writtenword.ca website. I quickly found that cheap or free web layout programs usually are not that easy to use, and worse, are not reliable. Freeway Express, for example, is free, but it inexplicably changed the names of all my image files. If all I wanted to do were to create a nice website that sat on my desktop computer, it was great. But when it came to uploading it to my domain host, well … I’ll tell you about that in a future post, where I review the software in detail.

Finally, I took the excellent advice offered by many colleagues, some of whom I hope are reading this post now. I decided to move to WordPress. Instead of trying to link the blog to an existing website, with WordPress, you create a website with the blogging interface. Then, you upload files to the domain host that essentially link the browser back to the wordpress.org platform. WordPress takes care of most of the grunt work of keeping track of file directories, and there’s no need to use an FTP uploader. I don’t have to wonder whether Host Name is the same as Server Name. And I don’t have to learn how to write Cascading Style Sheets, either.

WordPress also has a lot of other great features, like comment spam filters, galleries, sliders and carousels for images. MailChimp is integrated into the system, too—not that I’ve used it, but others tell me it’s quite powerful.

But the most immediate appeal was the range of layout templates WordPress offers.

How I did it

I knew that if I were to try to make this change completely on my own, I’d spend weeks chasing down blind alleys and making all sorts of newbie errors, so I turned to blog expert extraordinaire, and author, Barb Drozdowich of Sugarbeats Books. She’s also the author of The Book Blogger Platform and several other guidebooks for authors, and a founding member of BestSelling Reads. In the next post, I’ll explain all the details on how I made the transfer, along with some key pointers for anyone else who wants to try a self-hosted WordPress site themselves.

But for now, I want to encourage you to explore the site. Click on the house icon at top left for the Home page, and explore the four different service pages: Creating, Polishing, Publishing and Training. Check out the work that I’ve done: Books written, Books edited and Articles written. Explore the blog categories and leave comments.

Don’t ignore those social media sharing buttons. Please, if you like the look, Like it on Facebook, Plus One it on Google+, Pin it on Pinterest and all that other stuff.

Or just go to the Contact page and let me know what you think by email or any other medium.

Thanks for sharing!