Moving from Typepad to Wordpress

Last week I spent about half a day sorting out moving the Savvy Marketers blog from Typepad to WordPress. I'd been quite daunted about doing it for a while and read up on what other people had done, but in the end it turned out less difficult than I initially thought.

The reason for moving the blog is so that we can develop Savvy Marketers without the restrictions of Typepad, as there are a few things we want to do with the website that we can't do within the Typepad platform. WordPress (the self hosted version), will give us much more flexibility to do what we want!

I won't go into the nitty gritty of what is involved in moving the blog, but there are a few things you need to consider if you want to set up a site on the self hosted version of WordPress.

1. Find a hosting company that supports WordPress. For my TouteFrance site, I used the existing web hosting company I use for my static Forty First website, but have had various things which haven't worked very well as they're not really geared up for WordPress. They offer php and a MySQL database, which are the basic requirements of WordPress hosting, but things still don't work properly on the site. For Savvy Marketers, we're using Heart Internet for our hosting, who seem to be much better. Hosting costs vary quite considerably, so it's worth shopping around.

2. Make sure you're able to move your domain easily if it's hosted in a place away from where you want your WordPress site to be hosted. I was able to do this within a control panel on the website I used to buy the domain, but did have to pay to move the domain to the new web hosting company.

3. You'll need some technical knowledge if you want to use WordPress.org (unless you're paying someone to do all the techie stuff for you), but it's worth understanding basic FTP as you may want to use 'plugins' that will enhance your site without asking someone to sort it out for you each time.

4. Once your new web hosting and domain is set up, you'll need to choose a nice theme for your blog. There are plenty out there, a good list is on Smashing Magazine, but you can pay for themes too, we use Thesis and another paid for theme is Elegant Themes.

5. Invest in a copy of WordPress for Dummies - this book has saved my bacon a couple of times and went through the set up of WordPress as well as importing the Typepad posts in an easy to read, non-techie, step by step way. The newest version of the book covers the latest version of WordPress.

Importing the Typepad posts to WordPress was really easy and WordPress even recognised the multiple authors. I had to customise the urls in WordPress to match the Typepad urls and the only thing left to do is edit all the images in the posts, which currently point to Typepad. I've had a few other WordPress problems to deal with but on the whole, we're very pleased with the move so far!