There seems to be a stream of people transferring from Blogger to Wordpress lately.  With that comes tons of questions.  This is my attempt to help to answer as many as I can.

What is the main difference between Blogger and Wordpress?

Blogger is a free blogging platform that is provided by Blogger.  Wordpress is a self-hosted blogging platform that allows the user to install plugins (analytics, social media, many many more! ) in to your own host.  There is also more capabilities in the design functionality as well with drop down menus easily manageable by the blogger, and many more.

But the #1 reason here, is the plugins!

The only Con, I would say, is that you need to know a tiny bit of html.  The widget feature in WP isn’t as simple as Blogger.  So you’ll need to know a bit of html in order to place your ads, graphics, etc.

Will I loose my posts from Blogger or Can they be imported into WP?

WP has a great import tool.  It will import all your blogger posts and comments into your new WP blog.  I have had a few issues with the import not importing all the comments if you have thousands upon thousands, but I do my very best to pull everything over.

What about all my subscribers via RSS and email?

If, when you first started your blog, you signed up for feedburner for your blogger feed, I can easily update this to your new wordpress feed.  However, if you’d never signed up for a feedburner account and have stayed on your blogger feed this entire time, I will not be able to transfer your feed.  This means you will loose your subscribers.

Can I forward my old blogger url to my new wordpress blog?

To the best of my knowledge, we are unable to point your blogspot.com address to your new domain.  The blogspot address is owned by blogger and can’t be forwarded like a typical domain.  ( If someone knows how to do this, and I am wrong, please let me know! )

The best thing to do here, is to put up a last posts stating that you have moved.  Your blogger blog will always remain live unless you delete the blog entirely, which I don’t recommend doing.

Will my widgets/gadgets transfer over?

They don’t actually.  They have to be transferred over manually.

Will I be able to edit my navigation menu?

I do my best in all my blog designs to keep this portion editable by the client.  If for some reason, I don’t think it would be editable, I will let you know beforehand.

What is the difference between categories and pages?

In blogger, in order to have a navigation bar and have proper links you have to use posts.  This will always show the comments, date, etc as all your other posts do.

With wordpress you have pages for the links like about, contact, etc.  Any of the pages that would only contain 1 piece of information.

Then you have categories which is how you label your posts.  This is the same thing as labels in Blogger.  When your blogger blog is imported into Wordpress, all your categories will transfer over as well.

What are themes and which do you recommend?

Themes are the actual design and functionality of your blog.  When I’m doing a completely custom wordpress design, I like to use the Lifestyle theme by Studiopress.  This theme has lots of great options and features, and I can completely recode this theme however I’d like it.

Another theme I recommend is the Thesis theme.  A lot of bloggers request this theme, so its pretty common.  I do find from a design standpoint that I’m fairly limited with this theme as far as design is concerned.  I can simply do a header and background and change up the colors of the navigation to match.  You won’t see my typical blog designs using this theme, but you will have lots of editing freedom of your own.  Overall, this is a great theme though, so don’t let me steer you away.

Here are some examples of wordpress blogs I’ve designed using these themes:

Lifestyle theme:
Frugal Adventures
My Restored Life
Fistful of Coupons

Thesis:
Happy Homemaker

What are plugins and why do I need/use them?

“Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine.”-Wordpress.org site

Simply stated, but it’s the truth.  There is a plugin for anything you can possibly think of.  Social Networking, analytics, print posts, featured gallery, just to name a few.

You can go here to browse through the list of available plugins.

I generally install up to 3 plugins will all my wordpress designs.

***Do you have a question that you don’t see here? Leave it in the comments and I’ll add it to this posts.***