After a long and sometimes painful process of moving SuccessvilleNews from one platform and style to a new, strictly blog information style, there are some things I wish I had known ahead of time.
Here are five things I wish they had told me.
1. Domain name transfer. I had the domain name “SuccessvilleNews.com” hosted at Blinkweb, and they don’t allow you to point it somewhere else. That meant I had to transfer the domain name to another host who could do what I wanted to do with it. What they didn’t tell me was that this process takes a full five days, if everything goes right.
2. When you are in your Godaddy hosting account, it LOOKS like you are in WordPress, but YOU AREN’T. I have had JackBeddall.com with Godaddy from its inception, so I assumed when I was adding and editing posts, I mistakenly thought I was in WordPress. The two look almost exactly alike, but they are two separate places.
That means that if you start your blog on WordPress while you are waiting for the domain name change, and choose a bunch of basic layout stuff, you are wasting your time. The only things that make the migration are posts, comments, categories, and pages. Formatting choices don’t come with you.
3. Permalinks. You have better choices for the permalinks at Godady. The biggest difference is that your links to posts inside the blog will be much shorter if you have your blog hosted.
4. Java script. If you want to put anything containing Java script (like opt-in box, twitter link, etc.), you have to have the hosting. WordPress does not allow any kind of java or embed code, except for a few sites like Youtube. That means that if you start in WordPress, you will have a period of time in Godaddy where the site is live, but you don’t really have some of the things you want there.
5. Style choices. You have a much wider array of choices at WordPress. I set SuccessvilleNews up with a three column format, and Godaddy’s default options don’t include that. That means it’s live, but doesn’t look like you want it to look until you make some drastic changes.
With all that said, it isn’t strictly necessary to have your blog hosted somewhere else. You can use the wordpress hosting. However, when you do, the default URL will be something like “yourblogname.wordpress.com.” You can always point a different URL to it, but that still leaves you with some ungainly long URLs for different pages or posts.
The biggest benefit of Godaddy hosting is the analytics available. I had been shortening all my links with bit.ly, and then posting them so I could count clicks. With the Godaddy statistics, I can see everything from which pages are getting seen, how long people stay on each page, where they are coming from, and about a dozen other things. Necessary stuff, and easily worth the $5 a month or so it costs.
You now know what I didn’t know. Lucky you.

