In December of last year we decided to move our blog from a hosted WordPress to WordPress.com (abbreviated as WP.com). I wrote about the advantages and disadvantages in the post Moving to WordPress.com – What to Consider. For several months it remained the right place for our blog and I still think it was the correct decision at the time. But many of the advantages of hosting with WordPress.com have actually been overridden by updates to the WordPress software. Here are the key reasons we went back to a hosted WordPress…
[Read more…] about Why I Moved Off WordPress.com
business blogging
Do You Have a Blogging Strategy?
Many businesses have blogs. Many businesses feel they should start blogs. Why? Because everyone else is doing it. This isn’t a really strong reason to do anything in business – unless you want to be just like everyone else.
If you have a business blog or are thinking of starting one, take a few minutes to ponder why you are blogging. Hopefully your reasons involve helping and connecting with your customers, which should increase revenue and savings. Using these reasons as goals to form a blogging strategy can really help direct your efforts and produce better results.
Once you have an endpoint (your goals), it will be much easier to work backwards to figure out how to achieve your goals. What will you write about? Who in your company will be blogging? What will you incorporate into the design of your blog? How will you connect with your customers? Where will you syndicate your blog content? Will you use social media to increase awareness of your blog?
Do you have a business blog? What is your blogging strategy?
(photo by hi I’m h micheal @ Flickr CC)
Moving to WordPress.com – What to Consider
Over the break we moved Sazbean.com and some of our other blogs over to WordPress.com from self-hosting WordPress on our own server. Most of the process was relatively easy and overall we’re pleased with the results. We made the decision to move for a few reasons: saving time and effort from updates and support, saving hosting costs (much cheaper), and additional syndication across WordPress’ network.
If you’re thinking of moving to WordPress.com or using them as your blogging platform, here’s what you should consider:
Advantages
- WordPress.com takes care of all the updates and support
- Cheap – you can have a blog hosted for free, but their low cost upgrades for control over CSS and domain name are worth it
- Additional syndication of your content throughout the WordPress network – we’ve already seen a jump in traffic from this effect
- Good selection of widgets to add functionality to your site – no need to worry about getting them working properly
- Integrated dashboard – makes it easy to work with multiple blogs and the interface is very easy to use
Disadvantages
- Limited control over the design and functionality of your blog (you have full CSS control with a paid upgrade)
- No javascript allowed – which limits your ability to use custom widgets and other services that require a script tag
- No outside site analytics – WordPress.com provides integrated statistics, but you won’t be able to use any outside analytics services since you cannot add any script tags to your blog
- Limited control over your domain name – unless you have control over your name server, you have to point your blog domain to wordpress.com so you’ll lose the ability to add any subdomains. They have allowed some ability to host your own email or use Gmail. Hosting multiple blogs from the same domain is also limited.
- Limited control over files you can add to your blog (only images unless you purchase an upgrade – and then only movie files) – not too much of a problem with the various types of web services available to link to
Summary
After we moved to WordPress.com there have been some things that we could no longer do on our blog (in design and some in functionality). But, overall, the tradeoff in terms of cost and time savings as well as additional exposure has already been worth it. We’ll update you on our thoughts again after we’ve been here for awhile.
We want to hear from you – Do you use WordPress.com? What are your thoughts? If you have a self-hosted blog, why did you make that decision?