I’ve been doing a bit of work on a few websites lately.  One thing that I realised during my website work is that my hosting provider (GoDaddy) lets you host multiple sites, with multiple domain names, all under one hosting account. I hadn’t realised that before. I only thought that you could set up individual sites within folders, but not with domain names pointing to those folders. That allowed me to consolidate a bit of hosting all under one account. I kept the GoDaddy one. Even though it’s not the cheapest, it does provide you with a lot of control.

During the process, I investigated the WordPress blog system, and was pretty impressed by it. It’s got all the advantages of Blogger’s system, but it’s a lot more flexible, and being installed on your own host, it gives you total control of every aspect of the site. Plus, I like the aesthetics of the content-management system, and the innumerable themes which are available. I only found the Blogger themes to be ‘okay’ at best.

One thing I did was move my church’s website (coalcitycc.com.au) across to wordpress. This makes for much easier posting of the weekly sermons. Previous to that, the church’s website was just created in Apple’s iweb. Adding a new sermon each week involved a fair amount of messing around, and re-uploading the whole ‘sermon’ directory to the server.

Having a full content-management system with user control will also mean that I can create pages that other people can edit, without messing up the whole site. Ie, the youth leader can safely and securely edit the ‘youth’ page. This should allow for a much more dynamic website, as the individual group leaders can control and edit their own pages.

Since the church website was up and running nicely, I thought that I should think about moving this blog across. After thinking about it for a bit, I realised that there was no good reason to stay on blogger. I set up WordPress and imported across all my old posts. The biggest hassle was changing the DNS entries.

The main downside is that I’ve lost the comments that were already in Blogger’s system. Despite the import plug-in saying that it was able to import comments, it turned out not to be the case.

Of course, the other downside is that I need to do my own backups, but that’s not too onerous.