Welcome to the new Roads Less Traveled Photography!

If you have visited Roads Less Traveled Photography recently, you no doubt notice that the site has a whole new look.  I recently received an invoice for the next year's hosting at my self-hosted Wordpress site and figured that was more than I wanted to shell out for another year of hosting.  So now it's hosted on Blogger.

Blogger you say?  This is a Blogger site?

I had looked at Blogger a couple years ago before going for a self-hosted Wordpress site.  The two main considerations then were one, a lot of Blogger sites looked dated and old, and two, there were strict limits on hosting photos.  That's a killer for a photography site, as you could well guess.

Since my site is now hosted on Blogger, you've likely figured out that Blogger has solved those two big problems, at least from my point of view.  But like any change, there are some plusses and minuses.

On the plus side, since my site is now integrated into the Googleverse, I'm hoping for better visibility.  When you self-host, you need to do all that Search Engine Optimization yourself, and maybe I just plain sucked at it.  But the old site never got the traffic I had hoped for.  Another plus is I don't have to go in and update all that behind the scenes stuff that makes a website work.  I don't have to update the Wordpress install every month or two.  I don't have to update the plug-ins when new updates are available.  If I waited a month between updating plug-ins, I'd likely have ten or more to do.

On the minus side, importing of comments has not happened yet.  It was a custom commenting system and likely something that either the Wordpress export or the Blogger import did not like or did not recognize.  Another minus is that some of the plugins did deliver some really nice functionality that I might miss.  But maybe some of this is available somewhere in the Bloggerverse and I just haven't found it yet.

It's likely that as the site evolves I'll discover other pluses and minuses.  But for now, I like the look and the functionality of my new Blogger site and I'm happy to be here.