Advice required about .com / .org

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  playstationcountry · Member · Oct 27, 2014 at 10:32 am

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  Hi everyone. Sorry if this is in the wrong forum.

  A friend of mine has a terrible website. It’s a mess of HTML awfulness but he also has two wordpress.com blogs linked from it.

  Now, I was thinking of setting up a proper WordPress installation that held his website and blogs all in one place. However, his .com blogs both have 3.5k followers which he wouldn’t want to lose I’m guessing.

  Either way I have to make him a nice WordPress site to replace what he’s got. Should I leave his two blogs alone or migrate that stuff?

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  lastnode · Member · Oct 27, 2014 at 11:29 am

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  Hi! We’d like to help, but it’s difficult to give advice without seeing the sites in question.

  A general WordPress.COM vs .ORG overview can be found here –

  WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

  But we’d be happy to help further if you give us more details! :)

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  playstationcountry · Member · Oct 27, 2014 at 12:02 pm

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  Cheers for the reply.

  The site in question is http://www.geoffreydavidwest.com

  That’s the HTML site. I think it was made in Dreamweaver. I definitely want to change that to a proper WordPress site and am capable of doing that.

  It links to his two blogs – http://geoffreywestdotcom.wordpress.com/ and http://jacklockwood.wordpress.com/ which get a lot of followers.

  Initially my thoughts were to put it all in one WordPress install and show him how to use categories. That’d be neater I think.

  However, at that point he loses a lot of followers from both of the .com blogs. Better functionality, easier SEO, much easier for him to update his main site. But those followers…

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  lastnode · Member · Oct 27, 2014 at 12:08 pm

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  Thanks for the info! Thankfully, WordPress.com lets you move subscribers between blogs –

  http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/moving-your-subscribers/#wordpress-com-site-to wordpress-com-site

  Thus, you could just move the subscribers of one of his WordPress.com blogs over to the other and start using it his main site.

  If you’re worried about losing search engine traffic, you could also purchase and use a Site Redirect –

  Site Redirect

  I think these links cover all your questions, but do let us know if there’s anything else we can help you with. Good luck!

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  gdwest123 · Member · Oct 27, 2014 at 1:29 pm

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  Thanks for the info. That’ll be very helpful.

  Just one more thing. What would you guys do?

  1. Replace the main site with a proper WordPress install and absorb the blogs into that.

  2. Replace the main site but leave the .com blogs as is.

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  raincoaster · Member · Oct 27, 2014 at 5:21 pm

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  2 but that’s because I’m lazy.