Migrating to WordPress
For quite some time I have been wishing I could add the ability for my visitors to comment on my projects. I didn’t want to have to re-do my entire site just to add that feature, but after trying to find a simple solution to add commenting to my site, I came to the conclusion that re-doing my entire site in WordPress might actually be easier in the end. So this weekend I decided to bite the bullet, take the plunge, face the music – I began the process of converting my entire site to WordPress.
So far, so good. My hosting company makes it pretty painless to install WordPress. My wife, Rarin, and my friend, Jim, have both built sites in WP already, so I have them as a resource to help answer my basic questions and ease my fears. Jim told me how you can search for themes and install them right in the WP admin tool, which made it easy to find a free theme that came close to my original BaldBrain layout.
Now don’t get me wrong, from there it got way more complicated to customize the theme to try and match my old site as closely as possible. Luckily, when I’m not wearing my BaldBrain super hero suit, I walk among the people of the earth disguised as a mild mannered web designer, skilled in PHP, mySQL and CSS. After a good part of a Saturday and Sunday spent on my computer, I have the site looking good enough to take it live.
Because Google and other search engines send a lot of traffic my way, I’ve setup all the URLs for my old pages to automagically forward themselves to their corresponding new WordPress pages. Eventually the search engines should get updated to point directly to the new pages.
I hope you enjoy my new site, and please leave comments so all this effort wasn’t for nothing.
By Jim Ferriman, January 23, 2011 @ 7:55 pm
It’s looking good! Can’t wait to see it when you get the content all switched over and possibly add a few plugins and widgets. I’m going to convert my personal site to WordPress too!
By Bald Brain, January 26, 2011 @ 6:45 pm
I’ve selected a great image gallery plugin called Fancy Gallery and another to show the social sharing links at the bottom of each post. I’m trying to add a few more post each day so it shouldn’t take too long to get all of my old pages converted over.
By Rarin, March 25, 2011 @ 6:16 pm
Great job! Everything looks awesome!