Adding WP to an existing site

[cpickett]

Hi,
First, hello and nice to meet you all.

I have what I hope is a quick question. I had a website built earlier this year and then started with blogger before knowing about some of the issues.

My question is: Will it help or hurt me to install WP on my current site? I had another WP expert tell me I should always just start with WP and not to do an add on because of how sites are crawled/indexed and the like.

If I should not do the above, should I just buy mysiteblog.com for example and put it there?

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks for your help.

[Blaine Moore]

In the first lesson or two, Yaro addresses this very topic.

My thoughts on the matter are that you should move to wordpress (or whatever platform you want to use) as soon as possible on your own domain. Using somebody else's domain like you are with blogger means you have to give up too much control. The longer that you wait to move to your own domain, the more painful an experience that it will be. Better to get it over with as quickly as possible.

You can set up your own blog to forward users to the new articles, so you won't lose everything, of course, but there will be a slight drop in readership and search results while your new site gets reindexed.

[cpickett]

Thanks Blaine, but I guess maybe I wasn't clear.

It's not so much should I switch to having WP on its own domain (I know I need to and plan on it in the future), but more which way so that I keep things together as much as possible (blog and regular site).

Can I just add WP into my current site and still make the search engines happy? Again, that other person told me I should never do that.

If that's what you meant by Yaro covers that in the early lessons, then I will wait for an answer until I can get into that course at some point as budget allows.

Thanks again.

[Blaine Moore]

Cheryl,

I don't think that it really matters if you have the blog on the same domain as another site (be it in a subdirectory or a subdomain) as long as the two sites are related. For example, having an ecommerce store at the root domain and a blog in a subdirectory that is about your business makes perfect sense. It also doesn't hurt to have seperate domains in this case.

However, if you have a blog about chess and your main site is about selling laundry detergent, then it really wouldn't make sense to put them on the same domain. In this case, I'd always use seperate domains.

[cpickett]

My blog and site are meant to support each other. Your example of selling on part of the site and having a blog on part of it is pretty much how I was hoping they could work together.

The thought is the blog would bring traffic and I could offer changing, updated info easily without having to post articles in the usual static format if that makes sense.

Thanks so much.

[Sue Portman]

I've been investigating this one too - the consensus seems to be that if you intend to monetize your blog (which is where Yaro is heading) you need a unique, separate domain name for it.

If it's just a traffic driver for your other site and you're not interested in getting advertisers onto it, then it can happily sit in a sub-directory of the company website and have results.

However, if you DO intend to earn money from it, you need the traffic stats to be completely about the blog domain, and putting it inside another site can confuse the counters - you site will get the hit credits, not the blog inside it, so it looks less attractive to potential advertising customers.

A stand alone blog domain keeps all the credits for the hits, so is more likely to make advertising revenue.

At least that's what I've been hearing - any different knowledge anyone has, please impart!

Sue
Creative Hub

[cpickett]

Great information Sue, thank you.

[sunnyman]

I have seen some bloggers keep the blog in a separate directory under the main - static - url, like:
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/
so, why not you too?