So I finally did it. I moved my blog from WordPress.com to Bethgranter.com (which was embarrasingly out of date due to being hard coded) using the WordPress.org CMS. Picked a new theme. Set the front page to a single Page rather than latest Posts (good or bad idea? Comments please). Imported all my content and your comments. BUT…

My old blog at WordPress.com has a bunch of incoming links from various places from over the years, providing lots of lovely Google Juice. Obviously the new site doesn’t (yet). I can’t do any automatic redirecting from WordPress.com because it’s hosted there and they don’t allow it (for free… there may be a paid option, not sure). So I’ve just put a big fat ‘This blog has moved to bethgranter.com’ message in the navigation and on the homepage.

However, when people go direct to a specific article, which they normally do, via Google searches or inbound links, they still get the content they wanted, so have no reason to go through to my new site. If I were to delete all my old posts, people coming via referring links to posts would be faced with a ‘page not found’ message (albeit provided in a friendly WordPress tone of voice) with the ‘this blog has moved to bethgranter.com’ message in the header and sidebar.  And Google would recognise the bethgranter.com content as the priority. Although without those inbound links those good (moved) posts would have no Google Juice, so I’d get less traffic. Today so far my blog at WordPress.com had 68 visitors. This one at Bethgranter.com had 17, of which 5 were from the old blog. I guess that’s not bad considering I only put the blog on Bethgranter.com 48 hours ago. So yeah, the question is:

Should I delete my old juiced up blog posts from WordPress.com now they are on Bethgranter.com?!

Here's a cool looking kid who doesn't know what to do either. Photo by yamagatacamille.

So I just copied my blog over to bethgranter.com/blog/ just to see if I could, and so I could have a go at using WordPress for a CMS so I know how to do it for clients.  It was pretty successful and now I’ll be able to edit the CSS to my liking, although I do rather like the Unsleepable theme as it stands.  Anyway, the biggest hassle has been moving across all my widgets and I still haven’t finished doing that.  Other than that, very nice and easy.  I’ve even set up a bunch of pages to hold all the information I did have on my standalone site, e.g. the content from bethgranter.com/illustration is now a page under bethgranter.com/blog (I realise I could have done this here too).  So now I have a couple of dilemmas.  This blog as it stands has quite good Google ranking and about 25 readers a day.  What do I do now?  Should I post something here that says there won’t be any more posts and just tell everyone to go over to my bethgranter.com site for new content?  Or forget my new URL and leave my content as it is, hosted by WordPress?  And what about old posts here?  They are linked to from all over the place so I don’t want to delete them.  But should I turn off comments so i don’t end up with lots of new comments on this blog and other new comments on the bethgranter.com one?  I am confused.