A rather frazzled wedding photographer asked out aloud why her wordpress.com based blog/site was suddenly seeing advertisements that she hadn’t approved. I quickly contacted her and let her know that because her site was (nameofherbusiness.wordpress.com) she was having WordPress dictate what goes on her site. What she has is a “managed” blog site. One easy solution would be to move to a self-hosted site.
Thankfully, there are ways to move your content over to a site that you have more control over. Also, if you are just starting out as a photographer and want to do it right, read on.
Full disclosure – not long ago, this site was hosted and managed by Typepad. In a future post, I’ll go into more detail about why I moved from that managed option to a self-hosted solution.
I first came across this blog post: How To – Move From WordPress.com To WordPress.org. If that’s a bit too geeky, check out the graphic below:
Like this infographic? Get more WordPress and hosting tips from Synthesis.
And, if that doesn’t do it for you, you may want to sign up for this FREE 9-part course called Site Set-Up Kit. Produced by Wendy Cholbi and Pamela Wilson, it’s targeted towards beginners and they promise that it will be jargon-free. Even though I publish this and other blogs using the WordPress platform, I signed up to learn something new.
Tiffinbox, for example, is a self-hosted site. That means, I pay to host it on a server owned by BlueHost.com [affiliate] and I get to decide on what gets published, including advertisements. When, not if, you start considering where to host your blog or your website, I recommend BlueHost as an option. They routinely rank high among website hosting companies and I have always found their customer service to be very prompt.
So, if you have a website or blog hosted and managed by say, Blogger, Typepad or LiveJournal, where you really do not have a way of controlling all of the content you see on your site, you should be going the self-hosted WordPress route.
Yes, there is a little bit of work involved in setting it up. So, if you have any questions about that feel free to ask in the comments section below. I am happy to help as best as I can, or, I will direct you to a resource who will address your concerns.
I just stumbled upon another blog post about setting up a self-hosted WordPress website by Michael Hyatt. Check it out too!
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