A Serious Food Blogger Switches from Typepad to WordPress

Diane's Blueberry-Blackberry Crumble Pie - YUUUMMMM!

Diane Eblin, besides being one of my wonderful clients, is a very serious blogger… a very seriously gourmet gluten-free foodie blogger. Her site, The W.H.O.L.E. Gang,  boasts a huge treasure trove of mouth-watering gluten-free organic recipes for all sorts of treats, from humble egg salad to an elegant Bananas Foster.

Diane’s food blogging began with an account at Typepad. Typepad is a great place to start with blogging, and I still recommend it for those who don’t want to be bothered with version updates or having to install or host a blogsite on their own. It’s a great out-of-the-box solution. However, Diane’s site grew into a serious enterprise and with that growth came the need for more flexibility and screen real estate.  WordPress with the Thesis Theme was the perfect solution. WordPress offered the flexibility and Thesis offered easy layout control and unparallelled search optimization.  Thesis also fit Diane’s design goals of more screen space and a clean look that could also retain the branding and color of the existing W.H.O.L.E. Gang blog.

To start the transition, I installed WordPress and Thesis on a test server which allowed me to work with Diane on testing the design customizations and tweak the look so that the “going live” with the new site would be as seamless as possible. We even did a test content import. Posts, tags, categories and pages imported cleanly. The only aspect of the transition which required a lot of work was relocating the beautiful photos Diane took of her gluten-free creations. Diane took that on herself, which saved quite a bit on the project time.

When we moved the blog over “live” – all we had to do was set up WordPress, import the latest content, upload Thesis and its customized files to the new host server.  A few tweaks with adding sidebar content and widgets – and all was done!  The transition was smooth with absolute minimal (less than 1 hour) downtime.

Thanks, Diane for working with me on this project – you made it a lot of fun!!

Visit Diane’s new The W.H.O.L.E. Gang blogsite.