Blog tech help needed...

Hip-Hop-a-potamus

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I can't seem to figure this out, no matter how I try. Can anyone help?

So, right now I have a paid domain website and a blog through Wordpress. Every time I want to update my website, I make the updates, then tell my husband what's new, and he has to go and update everything on his system (long story, trust me).

What I want to do is to have one of the Wordpress sites that's a blog and website combined so I can do everything in one place. So, that means I need to upgrade to the Wordpress.org self-hosting thing, right?

Now, if I want to give that website/blog the same name as the domain I already have, how do I do that? Will my old content go away? Will I not be able to re-use my name? What do I do?

When I do the changeover, I probably need to save my existing blog content somehow so I don't lose it, right? Will I be able to migrate it over to the one that's self-hosted? I keep trying to read things that sound helpful, but they're all blog experts and they talk over my head. I have NO idea what I'm doing.

A cookie for the first smartypants who can explain this so I get it. :e2cookie:
 

tiddlywinks

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Hey Hip-Hop,

Okay, so this link to WordPress's guide on switching from .com to .org should help with part of your questions (and it's pretty easy to follow no matter your level of website/html/techny understanding): http://how-to-properly-move-your-blog-from-wordpress-com-to-wordpress-org

Now, I haven't combined a wordpress.com blog AND a website into a wordpress.org website (if I'm understanding your situation correctly). But, you should be able to import your blog portion from .com to .org pretty easily given the import migration feature, which is explained in the above tutorial I linked you to. I'm guessing that you're going to have to migrate some of your old website content yourself though, since that's not on the wordpress.com blog, right? So, you shouldn't lose your blog content, barring any snafus.

You can also certainly keep your domain name - you'll just need to redirect or "point" it in the direction of your new wordpress.org site, once it's ready to go live. The instructions for doing this may be a little different depending on which domain spot you bought your name from (GoDaddy, wordpress itself, etc.).

The one thing I'm less certain about is losing some of your search engine ranking stuff in all of this, given you are smooshing your website and blog into one - the tutorial covers what happens if you're making a straight up switch from .com to .org, but you have a wordpress blog within a larger site, so...(again, if I'm understanding you correctly). I'd suggest doing a little more digging on that end to see what you uncover. I'm guessing you'll need to make sure you recreate your site-map to mimic the old site-map in order to ensure your page naming structure stays the same...but definitely not an expert on that bit. Sorry I can't be more help there.

If you haven't already, you might try asking some of your questions in the WordPress Support Forums.

Hope that helps a little? Good luck!
 

Hip-Hop-a-potamus

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Update: My husband is a genius. Between the two of us last night, using your link and him researching a bit with my web-hosting service (InMotion), he discovered that they already have a way to change stuff over to WordPress. So I exported the XML file from the old blog and imported it into the new one. Everything overwrote. :D

All I had to do was some finessing (download my really old theme and import it to the new blog, change the colours, and re-orient everything the way I had it). All I need to do now is a bit more tweaking of fonts and such.

Thanks, Tiddles!