The Ask: Move a freelance writer’s site from Blogger to WordPress
Why It’s Important: As a freelancer, managing your own site can boost your brand and its credibility (source)
The Process: This writer had been blogging about tabletop gaming for years out of personal interest. Because he was moving into professional freelance work, he wanted to take more control over the layout and behavior of his blog.
We talked about his preferences for the site, and I set up hosting for him through an independent service.
I exported the content of his blog. Then I imported the posts, images, and metadata (like tags) into WordPress.
I ran a MYSQL search to look for absolute links following the Blogger URL pattern. I updated those URL references to relative links because that helped with the domain name change and would also let us add an SSL certificate more easily.
The first pass at a theme helped bring some content hierarchy to the page.
We highlighted 3 main areas of content:
- Work You Can Buy – This was both a list of work for prospective employers and a way for people who liked his blog to buy the games he’d helped write. Because this was the most important content area from a money-making perspective, we placed this as close as possible to the top-left-hand side of the page. (His audience is almost entirely English-speaking.)
- Game Theory and Design – While this was closest to his heart as a writer, it was likely to be the least-visited of the three main topic areas. So this section took up the least valuable middle space.
- Free Gaming Resources – Definitely the most popular area of the site, this content drove SEO traffic and visual interest across the page.
Once we had the content imported and the main theme decisions made, we could making improvements.
Because a close friend of his has color blindness, he wanted to make sure that the theme’s default colors were changed to something that wouldn’t be so difficult for his friend to use. We looked at several different default colors: two shades of blue, a brown, a burgundy, and a dark green. An informal poll chose the dark blue as the most popular color.
We ran that color through a color blindness simulator with good results.
We also set up Google Analytics so that he could track the number of visitors who used outbound links to sites that sold his work.
