Robert and I decided at the beginning of this year that we would risk our Technorati ranking and Google juice to switch from http://twelvehorses.typepad.com to a hosted WordPress solution at the domain name http://blog.twelvehorses.com. Since we are switching domain names, there is no clean way to retain our search rankings. However, we are confident that we can recoup them rather fast and we feel the benefits of WordPress out weight the risks of changing. Granted, all this could have been avoided had we just mapped a personal domain to typepad.com to begin with…doh! Anyway, here are our reasons for switching to WordPress in no particular order:

• Plugins - Plugins allow you to extend the functionality of the WordPress blogging software. An example of a plugin is the Google Sitemaps plugin. This plugin will create an XML file that the search engines (at least Google, Yahoo and MSN) can read. The files lists the pages in your site and how often they are updated. In this way, the search engines know what pages to add to their index. The plugin automatically recreates this XML file after each posts as well as pings Google to let them know of the update. Typepad.com has widgets, which are like plugins, but far fewer and they aren’t as easy to manipulate.
• Stability - I’m not willing to say that Typepad.com was highly unstable, but they have had a few issues over the few weeks. A hosted solution allows us to control the hosting environment. If we have stability issues, we can only blame ourselves.
• Expertise - We have implemented over a dozen blogs for businesses in the last few months, and they have all been on WordPress. We’ve learned some very cool tips, tricks, and knowledge and wanted to take advantage of that on our own blog.
• Flexibility - WordPress is much more flexible than Typepad.com. It can have multiple static pages - pages not in the chronological order of the blog - as well as do things like display a different look and feel for a post based off the category it’s in.

At the end of the day, we just feel more in control with the blog sitting on our servers. This perception gives us a more active role in the blogging process instead of treating it like a 3rd party site that needs to be maintained. I hope we don’t inconvenience too many other bloggers asking them to update their links, but this will be the only time.

This entry was posted by Josh Kenzer on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Blog, Geeky Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.