First of all, I want to thank everyone for the incredible response to this week’s posts, especially the overwhelming response to the Search Engine Optimization post. There is some great energy happening around the clay blogs this week- conversations starting had by commenting back and forth, linking and sharing of one another’s posts, and lots changes being made on the pottery blogs to improve search results. I’m so glad that it’s been useful and may have sparked the interest of some of you out there!

I have gotten several questions on why I am planning on making the switch from Blogger to Wordpress. Luckily, Cynitha of Colorado Art Studio just happened to write this fantastic post today that just happens to answer this exact question in it. She made the switch a little while ago. It’s also a must read article if you were at all interested in my post earlier this week about SEO. I know it’s all a bit overwhelming, but you just need to jump in and start chipping away. (I’m reminding myself of this too.) One part of Cynthia’s answer that isn’t quite the same for me is that she was switching from a .blogspot account to her own domain so some of the growing pains won’t be the same for me since I am already using my own domain name (that will only really make sense if you read her post).

Cynthia also shared this fantastic website for anyone who has a website or blog: websitegrader.com
It seems like a great tool for telling you what you’re doing right with your site, what you need to do and how you’re doing in comparison to similar sites.(It doesn’t tell you this, but you’re limited to 2 comparison sites at a time.) And you can go back and see how your improvements are working. It pointed out to me some meta tag and descriptions that I’m missing. Oops! When I make the switch over to Wordpress, I will put some serious time and energy into improving my ‘grade’. I’m feeling really excited and anxious to make these changes now, but I’ll be patient…

I will go into depth about this whole change over process when it actually happens. We’re leaving in a couple of days for a big trip, so I’ve decided it would be best to wait until we get back to do it. I was having flashing of breaking something in the move, and then being out of the country for a couple of weeks and the blog being broken the whole time.

Good luck to all of you working on your blogs!