in a hurry
portland, oregon
One month ago I moved over from Blogspot to WordPress and launched a new look on my blog. Since then I’ve done more than a dozen posts and on the weekend I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress without incident. So it’s time to share the process I went through and the steps I took to get to this point for anyone who is interested in setting up their own blog. For those of you who want something simple (i.e. free), Blogspot is fine. I used it for the better part of a year and found it easy to do blog posts. Part way through the year, I found some code to re-size my images so that they were larger than the default code would allow. However this required me to load up my full-sized images to my website independently of Blogger and that got me thinking that perhaps I should host my blog on my own site. I had read that WordPress was a better application than Blogspot and the key reasons why I finally chose one over the other were creative control and ease of commenting.
Once I made the decision to move, I bought the WordPress for Dummies book. Not being a techie, I have to say that I don’t think my transition to WP would have gone as well as it did without having this book. I didn’t follow it religiously but rather used it as a reference. I also made sure that I had a good, dependable web-hosting service with 5-star customer service. This meant that I had to transfer my site from my original hosting service to ET WebHosting and that was smooth sailing all the way.
With the foundation all set and the four walls up, the next decision was really about the interior design. Twitter was a very useful tool as I saw several tweets about WP templates. Here is an example of 50 free WP themes and some premium WP themes. What I was looking for though was something specific for photographers, enter Don Giannatti and his Lighting Essentials WordPress templates courtesy of a tweet by @photojack. I looked at other options but I found myself coming back to Don’s templates. I think it’s because he is a photographer and he kept in mind the things that are important to us when he created these templates. Although I had a few hiccups working with WordPress and the template that I purchased, the most important thing to have is someone who can work through the issues with you. And Don was nothing but first class. He and his developer worked with me to make some minor customizations to the template but if you know a decent amount of HTML code you should have no problem. My coding knowledge is rusty to say the least but I was able to work with both the WP code as well as the Lighting Essentials theme code to create what you see today.
So what’s the verdict? For the most part, I’ve had a great response to the new design. One of the main pieces of feedback that I haven’t addressed yet is that some people think it’s difficult to find the blog posts off the home page. I am still thinking from a design point of view how to make this easier for those who don’t want to spend a few minutes exploring my home but would rather go straight through to the living room as it were. The other request made was for “previous” and “next” arrows on the gallery slideshows. For that I may need to go back to Don to see if he can include those for me. Overall I am pleased with the new look. I can hang my images on the walls of this new home and the guest book is filling up nicely!
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