Come for the Ride…

As far as corporate blogs go, I would rate “customizing” a very low priority item. This is especially true since we only have a limited number of readers and EasyAutoSales.com, the main business, lacks a working beta for testing. Also in all honesty, people go to blogs for content, not their design; when was the last time you cared about how TechCrunch or TechMeMe looked?

However, since I’m not familiar with our chosen code platform and I can’t help in that department, upgrading and moving the blog was what I’ve spent the last few days on as I took some time to learn more about WordPress and everything that it offers. As of this post, our new home is now at http://comefortheride.com

Compared to Blogger, Xanga, TypePad, LiveJournal, MySpace and various other platforms, WordPress seems to be the blog platform of choice for serious bloggers who want to make money and host their own domains; cause well… personal domains = BIG time. For once, I am happy to say that I am not a first adopter and that hopping onto WordPress this late in the game had the benefit of using a number of templates, plugins and migration tools that made the customization and transition from Blogger to WordPress a piece of cake!

I remember back in 1998 when I first started blogging, I literally had to create my own platform, first from static pages and quickly thereafter via a database. Creating a look required even more work as I literally had to spend days in Photoshop working up a template and then cutting everything to work as a html document; bloggers sure have it easy these days. WordPress templates (free or paid) are everywhere… and installing them was also cake. Blogger.com unfortunately only had a number of templates available and being a visual person, it was unsatisfactory.

So with a little manipulation of the CSS file and some simple installation instructions, our new blog is now fully customized and most of what we cared about: SEO friendliness, custom look, RSS feed, transferring content, etc. were all setup without too much sweat. As I dig into other needs, I’m sure I’ll be pleasantly surprised with additional features that WordPress can offer to help. Let’s just hope I don’t go overboard with it.

On a somewhat related note, Google Analytics now offers new code on its admin console for tracking and reporting additional stats (ga.js). It’s unclear what more they will be reporting for now but if you’re a stat freak and want to test out their new features in the near future, it may be worth logging in now and grabbing the new html code to place on your site. Had I not upgraded our blog to a new domain that required new codes, I probably wouldn’t have remembered reading about this a couple of days back.

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