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Last week was the official launch of the new look for The Written Word Communications Company. The new website is based on WordPress and integrates the Written Words blog with the home page of the website and new pages that describe the various services I offer companies—writing, editing, publishing and training—plus samples of the work I have done, including books I have written and books I have edited for other writers.

As I explained last week, I engaged the services of Bard Drozdowich of Sugarbeats Books to help make the transition. Barb steered me safely away from a lot of pitfalls.

WordPress offers a lot of options, tools and flexibility, as well as a wide range of beautiful templates, some free and some at a reasonable cost.

The first thing to realize, though, is that there are actually two WordPresses: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. I had been experimenting with a WordPress.com blog for months, to see whether it would be better than Blogger. I have also owned the Writtenword.ca domain for years. To host a WordPress site on your own domain, you have to use WordPress.org. It requires that you do more of the work and make more of the decisions (or pay someone to do that), but it also offers more flexibility and features.

With WordPress.org, I can edit the underlying code (something I don’t like to do, but is occasionally necessary) and add plug-ins for things like image galleries and “sliders”—those rotating images on the Home page.

Barb guided me to some good choices in templates and other plugins, including JetPack, which speeds up performance and loading and also offers statistics on visits to the site.

Barb set me up with a “practice” blog in WordPress.org, which I then customized and added to. When I was happy with it, it was time to move it to my writtenword.ca domain.

This was where it got tricky.

First, I had to back up my old site, then delete the old pages from the server. Next, we transferred the new WordPress pages and blog to the domain server. It turns out, a number of domain hosts have a one-button solution for this. My domain host is IX Web Hosting, which is reasonably priced and has 24-7 online live help. That was important.

Barb did the transfer and changed a few things in the underlying code. Meanwhile, I contacted the IX Web Hosting technicians to make some changes to the settings to allow some of my plug-ins to work.

The last thing to do was to transfer my old blog content to the WordPress site. This was tricky.

I actually started out by creating some new posts in WordPress, then copying and pasting individual posts from the Blogger system. But as you can imagine, that is painstakingly slow. And it means that posts that I created two or three years ago, once copied to WordPress, now bear the date they were copied.

WordPress.org has an Import tool. Click on it, and it supposedly transfers posts, categories, images and comments. But every time I tried to import my Blogger content to WordPress, the tool crashed.

It turns out that WordPress.org needs to have the data in its own format in order to take the data from the database that underlies every blog. And Blogger, naturally, does not follow the same database format as WordPress.

Some searching on the Web yielded a solution: first, import the posts from Blogger blog into WordPress.com. Remember that experimental WordPress.com blog I had? It came in very handy. WordPress.com has the same Import tool, and it brought in the posts from Blogger, no problem. More important, it put the data into WordPress format.

From there, I used the export tool to create a database in a spreadsheet format, which I could then import into WordPress.org.

And it worked! It brought over the text and most of the images, and associated them with the dates they had been entered into Blogger.

But somehow, the import tool missed some posts. None of the posts from 2010, 2011 or the first ten months of 2012 made it into the WordPress blog. “Who cares about old blog posts, anyway” you ask? Well, in 2011, I published my Get a GRIP series of writing tips, where I explain my four-step process for writing well and efficiently. They’re still popular, and I want to make them a part of the revamped website. So for those, and a few choice others, I copied and pasted them into new posts on WordPress. That meant they have 2015 publishing dates, but I can live with that.

Overall, it took about a month to get the practice blog, set up the pages I wanted, create the text and find the images, and then do the transfer to my own domain. I’m happy with the look and the functionality.

Now, I have one less excuse for not finishing my next novel.