Main Website
I have been asked so many times, that I decided it was time for a post to clear things up.
We are in the process of launching a brand new blog for the Real Estate Tomato, over at our main website: http://www.realestatetomato.com. I am happy to say that we will finally be free of this incredibly limited TypePad account.
The new blog is not live yet, so no need to rush over the and look for it. I will make a formal announcement here in the next couple of weeks. It has been a monumental task, moving the site, given the amount of content we have here on this blog.
The savvy might ask, "why not just import the data and turn it on?"
I wish it could have been that easy. But instead, I've decided to make it incredibly difficulty on myself. Because the site is at a new location (new domain), this means that all the internal links (1000s of them) are going to be pointing to the wrong URLs. Because the original content is on a TYPEPAD url (realestatetomato.typepad.com) I can't do a simple 301 redirection on them. In order to make sure every link in every post is connecting to the posts that they reference, I have to change each and every one of them by hand.
While I am in there, I am cleaning up the old content, looking for broken reference links, updating the images, improving the messages, improving the titles and re-categorizing and re-tagging each and every post. It is a ton of work, but I know it will be worth it in the end.
So what is the lesson you can all take from this?
Over 4 years ago, when I started the blog, I had no idea that it would be the foundation and voice for a new business. Because I had not considered that one day I may want to be free of TypePad and the proprietary template structure of their system, it had not occurred to me what a challenge it would pose to make the move.
The lesson is: If you ever plan on having your blog be a platform that you fully control, own and brand, you must not start it on a proprietary platform, or there will be hell to pay when it comes time to move.
My recommendation for your blog, or website: WordPress.
WordPress is the leader in the blog-platform industry, boasting users such as eBay, Ford, Sony, Wired, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall St. Journal, Harvard Law and all of our clients.
