We recently decided to launch a website based upon our Blog about our farm and daily life. There are some reasons for this, but this post is going to be about the growing pains associated with that move.
Our previous blog, http://www.heritagebreedsfarm.wordpress.com was beginning to get referrals from a few search engines, google.being the largest and main referrer. The blog was doing well with about 40 followers and 25 views or so per day. With that as a background, we purchased our domain name through namecheap.com and hosted our site through hostgator.com. we were up and running for about $30 (we purchased two domains and paid for one month of hosting). According to several websites, it is not recommended to self host a site until you have 1000 clicks and views per day. This number is for those simply trying to monetize their blog. Though that would be nice, we wanted some autonomy and liked the thought of self hosting our site. We had good success with wordpress.com and thought we could springboard off of that.
Well, so far the jump has been a learning experience. It seems as though wordpress.com is simple and very user friendly. It also seems to be a place to build a blogging community. It was easy to read other blogs and to get followers.
So far, the self hosted site has not been as user friendly. There is deifintely a lot to learn. First off, the plugins and widgets have to be located. We performed a google search to figure out which ones to install to get up and running. The first that was critical was jetpack.
For more on this post go to http://heritagebreedsfarm.com
