Blog Redesign: From TypePad to WordPress

As my blog has continued to grow and progress over time I decided it was time to take the leap. By the leap I mean migrating my blog over to WordPress – a long-time goal of mine that didn’t quite make it into 2008. While Typepad has been great over the past year my blog needs a little more customization option – it was time to get under the hood and really see what this baby can do!

So why WordPress?

Typepad is a great tool for novice bloggers. With little work you can easily have a blog running on Typepad and by adding CSS it is possible to make some minor look and feel tweaks. Now this is not to say that Typepad is a bad choice for expert bloggers – it just depends on what you want to do with your blog. I wanted the ability to customize every detail of my blog’s layout, look, feel – as well as run it on my own server. While I knew it would take more time and I would have to do far more coding than with Typepad (which can be completely code-free) I was able to provide my readers with a far better experience.

Setting-up wordpress on GoDaddy is easy to do and only takes a few minutes. WordPress is easy to install however if you want to create custom themes you’ll need to know HTML and CSS and some PHP.

So what’s new?

The biggest upgrade I’ve made is making my blog an easily accessible content library. You can now view my posts by topic and new Domainers can easily acccess free tutorials on everything you need to get started and more! I don’t want people to simply acess my blog to read the latest post – I would like my blog to be easily used by new Domainers to help learn from my own experiences. This is how I learn the best and my readers have let me know time and time again that this works for them too!

Next – you’ll notice on the right-hand side the “Latest Videos” section – this is where you can easily access any of my latest Domaining Power Course videos. New Domainers can start here and get the fundamentals covered.

If you keep scrolling down the right-side you’ll see new banner ad space (now occupied by Google Ads until someone takes the slot) and below that my new Twitter feed. This provides my last three Twitter updates directly on my blog. Scroll down a bit further and you will now be able to see my most popular posts. This is a great way to see some of the highlights of the blog and get some good ideas for your own domain investments.

Last but not least is the re-design of the main post display area. Rather than displaying each post one-by-one I am now displaying the first two posts and then displaying two posts side-by-side. This gives the blog a bit more of a magazine-feel and I hope makes it easier for readers to browse the past few articles I’ve written.

I hope you like the design – please let me know if there is anything you really like/don’t like about the new design. The goal of any re-design is to make this site more useful and usable to my readers.

Thanks for reading and as always – Happy Flipping!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton