In a previous post, I wrote how I started my personal website with WordPress.com then moved to Blogger and ended up with my own site (ASP) and hosting (at Web Wiz). Now, after almost a year, I’m moving back to WordPress.com
(see my post about this experience)
This is an announcement rather than a real article.
Running your own site, hosting, and programming means a lot of freedom. It’s fun and real achievement. However, with a personal website, I found that it’s time consuming to manage my own site and to keep its programming/plugins up to date. After all, this is a non-profit site. Revenue generated from advertising on site isn’t that big – see my post where I talked about Google AdSense and its alternatives.
I chose to get back to WordPress.com for many reasons:
- It’s more stable, reliable platform, and SEO friendly.
- It has the best commenting system (see my other post about commenting options)
- I’m not so much into Google any more.
WordPress.org isn’t my type and won’t be. I still prefer programming with ASP(.net). Additionally, it won’t be different in terms of burden and time to keep the software and plugins up to date.
Here, you only need to have your own domain and to do some CSS customizing (see my post about how I designed the CSS template this way). On other hand, the package I chose costs almost the same. Unfortunately, I lost some of my articles’ comments as I was using Disqus commenting system. There was no way to import them here but I managed to import some manually. The URLs of pages are also different now.
What is CSS? What can I do with that ? how do I customize it ? Why should I customize it? And finally what is its purpose? Sorry I ask so much 😩
No worries, Oristel. Thanks for asking. When I started to use it, I felt that my WP site needs modifications such as: removing some white spaces here & there, shifting the social share buttons up, increasing the width of the article, …. CSS is the layout of a website, its colors, and the design. On WordPress, it’s the theme itself. Editing CSS is done through settings under theme customization. Some might change the theme itself while others might prefer to edit it as I did here. So, customizing it isn’t really needed on WordPress nor does it (generally speaking) affects functionality of the website.
Welcome back to WordPress. 🙂 I used to have my own website, and I still own two domains, but it’s just too much work for too little return. Apart from not being able to monetize my wordpress.com site, it suits me perfectly. Plus the community is great. 🙂
Thank you and I totally agree – the community here is really good which is the ultimate goal after all. You have a great blog that I’ll be visiting more for sure. Anyways, still good to have the domains in case you changed your mind.
Thank you, and yes, one day I’ll make a new website and link it to my blog, but I think I’ll still keep the blog! lol
I’m glad to have you here. Thank you and good luck in your wonderful blog and future website
lol – you too!
I just started using WordPress yesterday. I like it so far. I have my own website but this is far easier to manage.
Thank you Hanzo and welcome to WordPress. Yes, it’s easier here and it has more interactions comparing to other platforms…