1. Go to your WordPress dashboard
2. Go toTools–›Import
3. Select “Blogger ”

You will need to give WordPress permission to access your blogger account, but then it will all be over bar the tidying up. For instance, you might find that once all your posts are imported, you have categories that you would rather have as tags and vice versa. You can use the Tools–›Import–›Categories and Tags Converter to do this very painlessly.

You now have all your blog entries and comments safely in their new home. This is where the fun starts. Assuming you have been blogging for any length of time, you will have search engine rankings based on key words, loyal followers who have links to your blogger blog, links to specific posts from other sites, people subscribing to your RSS feeds. None of this has followed you. Yet. Meaning you stand to lose all this good work and all those relationships. But don’t panic! There is a really easy way of taking all that with you.

First things first – don’t delete your old blog. You are going to use some nifty 301 redirection to pass any traffic from your old blog on to your new blog. If you do a google search on migrating from Blogger to WordPress you will find lots of suggestions of how to achieve this, but I wasted several hours trying several versions before coming across Amit Agarwal’s article on Digital Inspiration.This takes you through 6 easy steps – 7 including redirecting your RSS feed -to achieving a completely lossless migration. The whole process, from importing your posts and comments to completing the RSS feed redirect, should take you less than an hour, and be close to painless. Good luck!

If, however, you are using the home page to display your blog entries, thematic assumes that it is enough to be able click on the blog title to get you back there if you wander off elsewhere on the site. Sometimes this is fine, but I like to add a link to “home” too, partly because I think it is good practice to have a really obvious way to navigate to the home page of any site, and partly because if you have a really simple blog, with only the blog page and an about page, it looks a little naff to just have one page link…

Fortunately, as with most things, Thematic and WordPress between them make it really easy to do this. Just add the following to your functions.php file:

// I want the home page to appear as a link in thematic_access
// First remove the standard thematic function
function remove_thematic_actions() {
 remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_access',9);
}
add_action('init','remove_thematic_actions');
// Recreate the Thematic Access with home (blog) page included
function childtheme_page_menu() { ?>
 <div id="access">
 <div><a href="#content" title="<?php _e('Skip navigation to the content', 'thematic'); ?>"><?php _e('Skip to content', 'thematic'); ?></a></div>
 <?php wp_page_menu('show_home=1&sort_column=menu_order') ?>
 </div><!-- #access -->
 <?php }

add_action('thematic_header','childtheme_page_menu','9');

For more ways to customise the navigation see the WordPress function reference for wp_page_menu() and the Themeshaper article on WordPress menu tricks

However, as ever the ThemeShaper forum came up trumps with a pretty detailed guide to the innards of the thematic_post_footer and how to filter them.

With all this help, it was easy to filter the footer to get rid of everything but the postcomments, and to change this to be of the format ‘Comments (X)’ where X is the number of comments:

// change comments text
function mypostcomments()    {
    if (comments_open())    {
        $postcommentnumber = get_comments_number();
        $postcomments = ' <span class="comments-link"><a href="' . get_permalink();
        $postcomments .= '#comments" title="' . __('Comment on ', 'thematic');
        $postcomments .= the_title_attribute('echo=0') . '">';
        $postcomments .= __('Comments (', 'thematic') . $postcommentnumber . ')</a&amp;rt;</span&amp;rt;';
        return $postcomments;
    }
}// end mypostcomments
add_filter('thematic_postfooter_postcomments','mypostcomments');

I recently found a great article by Chris Lake that covers the whole area well, and has links to some great tools. I also found colorschemedesigner.com which I can myself using even more than the excellent paletteman site.

However.

Being new to this there are a number of things I need to remember to do, preferably in the right order, to make the publication as smooth as possible. So this is my (probably evolving) checklist of what to do.

1. Use the export tool under (would you believe it) “Tools” to save the current WordPress site on the development server.
2. If using plugins with the facility to save settings, e.g. I use the Fast and Secure Contact Form plugin, save all these too, it will save lots of hassle.
3. Install WordPress on the client hosting package.
4. Install plugins and activate. Where necessary, e.g. for contact form, import settings.
5. Set the name, description, whether using a static home page, date preferences and permalink preferences.
6. Don’t forget to set the search engine option. I always hide sites under development ever since a client got a nasty shock when a daft test post appeared as a Google search result, but you really don’t want the live site to be hidden…
7. Import the site.
8. Upload the theme (or in my case, Thematic plus my child theme).
9. Activate the correct theme.
10. I haven’t tracked down the best way to deal with the annoyance of the “about” page which is always there on a fresh installation, as I usually have an “about” page of my own, but don’t want it ending up being called “about-2”. Currently I cut and paste the “real” page content into the “helpfully provided by WordPress” page and trash the imported page. Hacky but it works until I work out what I should be doing.
11. Make sure the page order is correct. I use the “My Page Order” plugin.
12. Set the widgets up correctly. It’s a bit of a shock to see your supposedly lovely site looking all wrong because the search box is appearing where the main page navigation should be…
13. Check, double check and then check again. Does it look and behave like it should? Is it valid html and css? (I’m assuming all the browser and screen resolution checks have already been done during development.)
14. I’m assuming I’ve already added in the google analytics code but I need to create a sitemap.
15. One last check, then contact the client and tell them their brand new shiny WordPress-based site is live and ready for action.
16. Worry about what I’ve forgotten…

*applause*

So here I am, embarking on my latest adventure as a web designer, using WordPress because a client wanted a website with an integrated blog. But I plumped for WordPress because it offers the possibility that I can give my clients far more control over their own content. Why should they need to contact me to add a line of news on their home page? or when they want to add another link? I know I am potentially doing myself out of what is, lets face it, a very useful source of income here, but it makes sense.

And then light dawned. Worpress is a content management system, not just a blogging tool. In my quest to make my client’s life easier I have learnt a lot about how to display different posts in different places based on what category they are in. So why not use the same thing to attempt to bring a little order to my own life? Why not use posts to “remember” that cool tip on how to control floats? Or to make it easy to find that great article on designing for accessibility?

So that’s what I am going to try to do. Which is why a lot of my blog is going to be notes to myself on why this or that article is really good. Maybe it will be useful to you too, but frankly, this is all about me…

Other people have put all this much more eloquently and reasonably, check out Jakob Nielsen’s post. It’s perfectly possible to create attractive, even beautiful, websites that don’t break the basic principles of the web, that you separate content from presentation and allow the user to control how they explore that content and even how they see it.