I attended a Guardian Masterclass yesterday on building a WordPress website in a day. When I started the MA my technical skills were limited. Whilst they are still not as good as some of my fellow students’ skills I now feel that I would like to branch out and consider converting to WordPress.org (the self-hosting alternative) rather than WordPress.com and build a website around my current blog.

I came away from the course full of enthusiasm and confident that I could do lots with my current blog to improve its format and presence, however as I worked through a number of the things I had noted down, it soon became obvious that a lot of the functionality highlighted on the course was not available to me on the .com version.   For example, downloading a number of recommended plugins (including monetisation, gallery functionality and Google Analytics) is not possible and more importantly being able to change my “ugly” permalinks to more meaningful ones, which is important for Google searches, appears not to be possible.   The range of themes available is also vastly increased by moving to WordPress.org.

I understand that I can import my WordPress.com content onto a WordPress.org version which is important in maintaining a complete version of my course blog in one place.

I am hoping that I can use the time until the next module starts to consider this change further and find out more clearly what the pros and cons are in sticking with my current arrangement of a simple blog and separate Clikpic website or moving to a combined WordPress.org website. Any comments on this will be gratefully received!

References

Sabin-Wilson, L (2017) WordPress for Dummies, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey

Alison Price

Alison Price

My name is Alison Price and for the past ten years I have travelled the world photographing wildlife, including Alaska, Antarctica, Borneo, Botswana, the Canadian Arctic, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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