If you are a frequent visitor of What-Sells-Online.com, you’d immediately notice the change in the look and feel of this blog. What is most apparent would be the new header. I wanted to create something that looked flashy, interesting and attractive. Perhaps, the shopping bags of the old blog didn’t have that much of an appeal. I also wanted my blog design to immediately grasp the attention of stumblers. I only have several seconds each time to make a positive (and hopefully, lasting) impression!

The New What Sells Online banner

The Old What Sells Online Banner

Why did I stop using Typepad?

Typepad is a great blogging service to start with. It provided some flexibility needed for a commercial blog, an easy-to-use interface, and most importantly, short descriptions of each section. Typepad gave me a whole lot of hand-holding I needed in starting my first commercial blog. For instance, I could easily add widgets, customize my own header and have it on my own domain.

After a season of using Typepad, and of comparing my blog look and feel with others, I found that my Typepad Pro account didn’t provide me with the flexibility I needed.

The URL of my blog posts could only take a maximum of 55 characters. I was disappointed that my URLs couldn’t display the full title of my posts. Most of the time, the titles in the URLs were truncated. I emailed them about this, and it seemed that there wasn’t much they could change for that. This was just how Typepad was designed.

Another issue I faced was the limitation in customizing the widths of the sidebar, which was largely fixed by the specific theme that you selected. This caused some of my widgets, such as Blog Rush and my Technorati Favorites Link Icon to appear truncated at the sides.

What’s different with a Wordpress powered blog?

With Wordpress, there are literally hundreds of templates I could choose from as a basis for my new blog design. The PHP design files that I could download, could be altered with any HTML code editor.

In addition, I set up three 150 px x 150 px ads within the top fold of the blog landing page. This helps to increase visibility to the ads.

Another change I like is the font and spacing used for the posts, which helps in improving readibility of the text. Being easier to read, meant that more people are likely to stay on the blog longer.

One feature I liked about Wordpress is it’s ability to allow post excerpts to be displayed on the blog’s landing page. I couldn’t do that in Typepad, which meant that readers had to scroll down lengthy posts before they could read the next one. Wordpress let’s you do this really easily!

The Migration Process

After downloading the free Wordpress installation file from Wordpress.org, I realized that the server-side scripting required that all files be installed on a server before it can be properly viewed. However, I was not entirely familiar yet with Wordpress, and wanted some time to easily customize my blog design, learn Wordpress, and also to migrate data over from Typepad. Thus, I decided to use my computer as a virtual server by downloading XAMPP. Step-by-step instructions to do this are easily available from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

One of the challenges I faced were the misalignment of the migrated text. Paragraph formatting did not work well, and I had to manually edit each post to ensure that it looked good within the new widths of the posts section. I also wanted to ensure that my posts maintained the same URL as they did before migration, and this involved customizing the Permalink settings. Typepad’s 55 character limitation on post URLs also meant that I had to alter settings within the My SQL database. This piece of guide from The Information Bank really helped me do this automatically.

In the midst of all this, Wordpress 2.5 was released. I wanted the latest and upgraded my local copy. Then, I registered myself with BlueHost, and am now hosting my blog there. While I had experienced teething problems when changing my name servers, BlueHost has thus far been very responsive to my support queries. Although they sometimes do give canned answers, they do look at your problem, and find the best solution they can for you. Most of all, they keep to their promises of responding within 24 hours.

Wordpress 2.5

One minor challenge with Wordpress 2.5 was that the Categories each post belonged to were not retained when importing from 2.4. Apart from that, while comments were visible from the comments section, they were not visible from the main page.

I soon figured out the remedy – to just re-save each post according to the appropriate categories. Doing this also caused the comments to be visible.

Another bigger challenge was the error shown when uploading the images. All the images in my blog pointed to their locations on the Typepad server. After migration, I had to reload all the images onto the wordpress server. However, the Add Media function just returned an error each time I tried to upload.

This took me a while longer to solve. Nevertheless, upon scouring the Support Forums, I realized that I had missed out copying some of the Wordpress 2.5 files at the root directory to my blog folder on the server. Obviously, this helped to fix the problem.

The New What Sells Online Blog

With this new blog, I foresee more flexibility in the design of What Sells Online! Also, from here onwards, I will be working more on consistent posting, and to provide my readers with valuable content. In addition, I’ll also be concentrating more on blog promotion work, as I aim to bring more visitors to this great site!

Comments anyone?