Blog Design: The Leveraged Sellout Blog Moves from Blogger to WordPress

Blog Name: The Leveraged Sellout
URL: www.leveragedsellout.com

The owner of The Leveraged Sellout blog contacted me a couple weeks ago to help him move his site from Blogger to a WordPress platform hosted on his own server. His biggest complaint with the Blogger layout was it wasn’t conducive to adding features, such as recent comments or a second sidebar.

What We Did:

• I recreated his blogger template in WordPress, adding a second sidebar right of the main content area for ad space.
• I imported all his posts, comments and links from his old Blogger site into his new WordPress site.
• I gave him more space between the header and main content area for a leaderboard size ad (728 px wide).
• I used the WP Plugin, Get Recent Comments, to add the most recent comments to his left sidebar.
• I used the Rate Comments plugin to give his readers the ability to rate specific comments.

The transition went very smoothly, and the site owner is already a huge WordPress fan:

“WordPress is AMAZING. I’m really impressed when going through the interface.”

He even tracked down this thread on the WordPress forum about using a 301 redirect to redirect people from his old Blogger posts to his new WordPress posts.

And finally, here’s what the website owner had to say about working with me:

“One might say that hiring a partner for your website is like hiring an au pair to look after your child. Using this analogy, Michael Pollack is like a 25 year old gorgeous French philosophy exchange student that’s fluent in English, trained in CPR, and was an 8-time winner on Iron Chef. You can basically give your kid to him and be certain he’ll take good care of it.”

“Michael helped transition a website I had from Blogger to WordPress. The task, at the surface, was not the most complex, but it was the kind that a lesser developer might have made into a nightmare. I offered Michael some of my original thoughts on the layout transition, and he augmented them with his expertise. He agreed to an extremely short timeline (3 days) and was basically finished within 1. I was most impressed by the fact that Michael made sure to manually take care of all the small details that someone else would probably look over (he made sure to import the exact name I post under, he photoshopped up a couple images to match my template, etc.)–he took care of the small things that were slightly out of scope, and I imagined I might have to do myself. Michael was remarkably responsive and made sure to respond to all my comments individually. ”

“Michael is intelligent, informed, and extremely easy to work with. He can raise my kids; he can perform open-heart surgery on me; and he can sure as heck do anything WordPress related.”