I am so thankful for such positive reviews on my new site. I am overwhelmed with joy, honestly. THANK YOU. A few inquired about how my blog was built. So I’m more than happy to share my process. ☺️
Here are a few reasons I decided to switch from Blogspot to WordPress & build my own site layout:
- I was told blogs hosted on Blogger/Blogspot are perceived as “hobby blogs.” Brands & collaborators sometimes immediately write you off if they get an impression that you are blogging for fun & not for financial compensation. Makes sense.
- Having a WordPress site gives you freedom to customize your site more. There are features to cityloveee.com that aren’t even fully developed, but I know I want to have the option to do it when the time comes.
- PLEASE correct me if I’m wrong, but I heard that the content you post on Blogspot becomes the property of Blogspot. (I hear that is the case for Facebook, by the way.)
- I wanted to build my site on my own because I wanted to learn about WordPress. I didn’t want to spend money for someone else to create my site, because I wouldn’t know where to look if there was a problem.
- I also didn’t want to spend the money (at this point) on hiring someone/buying a template.
My switching from Blogspot to WordPress + building a WordPress site is all self taught & researched. I cannot encourage you enough to just Google everything you want to learn. That leads me to my first step of my process. I searched “How to Build a WordPress Website” & found this video:
It has 2 million, almost 3 million views, so it got me thinking that maybe this video has been helpful for many people (& I turned out to be one of them!) I followed Tyler’s 2 1/2 hour video tutorial for a couple of days & learned more and more about how WordPress works. I completed the tutorial but did not like how the Blog page of my site looked. The point of this site is to consume content from my blog posts, so that needed to be the most attractive part, & it wasn’t. ? (I tried to figured out how to fix it, but I was getting so frustrated with the process. UGH. WordPress has a learning curve.)
I decided to find a WordPress template that I liked & use all of the skills from the video tutorial to create all of my pages (About, Where I’ve Been, Contact). I found “Chosen” by Compete Themes while browsing the template options offered by WordPress. I especially like this layout because I like when blogposts are organized similarly to Pinterest & you can see the categories easily. I also just knew I didn’t want my blog to look like everyone else’s.
So yes, I HIGHLY recommend the above video. It does a wonderful job explaining how to build a site on WordPress throughly & precisely!
Have you created your own site? Want to try? Please comment below any questions or comments!
– Christina