Hot Dog Stories has Moved

One of my other sites, Hot Dog Stories, has moved. Last week, I exported the site from the Blogger platform to a self hosted, Wordpress platform. I purchased the Genesis Theme Framework for Wordpress several months ago and I am beginning the migration process for several of my sites.

The Hot Dog Truck will probably never move. I have over 1300 posts here and the site ranks at or near the top in Google search for a number of keywords and phrases. I also have a pretty good page rank for this site (I hover between 3 & 4). I don't want to do anything to jeopardize the ranking of this site, so it will stay put. I won't move How to Start a Hot Dog Business either, for the same reasons. I figured I'd move Hot Dog Stories now, before it starts ranking big time for keywords. I like the Blogger platform and I have become fairly good at customizing Blogger templates, but in this day and age, it pays to diversify. Now that I have Hot Dog Stories on another server and IP address, I am hoping to get a bit more link juice from my Blogger sites.

The layout of Hot Dog Stories is essentially the same, so many people might not have even noticed the change. I set the site up on the Genesis Framework for Wordpress with the Prose theme.  I bought the "Pro Package when I purchased Genesis; this gives me unlimited access to ALL the Genesis templates. I am already in the process of building a website for a local law firm with a customized version of the Executive Template on the Genesis framework. I chose the Prose theme for Hot Dog Stories because it is the easiest to customize and I wanted to retain the layout of the site. I think it came out pretty good.

One of the benefits of having a self hosted Wordpress site is that I have complete control over my site. With a Blogger site, Google could come in and shut you down at any time, theoretically. I don't think they'd ever shut down the Hot Dog Truck-it conforms to the TOS, but I suppose there is always that chance (I back up the site weekly just to be safe). The Hostgator hosting package I purchased gives me complete control over every aspect of the site and allows me to host as many sites as I want. I can also grow my server size when I need more space.

Moving Hot Dog Stories wasn't difficult. There's a simple "import" button in Wordpress that will import an entire Blogger site. There are a few things to do manually to make the change smooth, but overall, it's a "one button" solution. A good article on importing a Blogger blog to Wordpress can be found here.

So far, so good. Check out the NEW Hot Dog Stories site.