David on Formosa

It is almost three years since I migrated this blog from its original home on blogger.com to self-hosted WordPress account. Setting up a WordPress blog can seem a little intimidating at first. I was fortunate to have some good advice and help from Fili when I first switched over.

The WordPress software has many functions which offer advantages over other blogging platforms. The latest versions of WordPress (2.7 and 2.8) have made maintenance a lot easier. Upgrading is now just a single click operation in the dashboard and there should be almost no need to manage files via FTP for most users.

I think one of the best things for me about using WordPress is its good SEO. From my perspective SEO is not important for making money, the small income stream from advertising is not my motivation for blogging. Good SEO ensures that people find quality and relevant content when they do searches. SEO is not rocket science. Using WordPress and installing a few plugins such as Google XML Sitemaps and All in One SEO Pack along with a robots.txt file will do a lot for SEO. Also including important keywords in titles and urls is important too. Fili has written more about SEO and WordPress on his tech blog.

There are many ways WordPress can be modified and customised. It is this flexibility and power that are its greatest advantage over other blogging platforms. I feel that I am perhaps not taking full advantage of the latest features. I would like to upgrade the current template and design, but I am yet to find a template that I really like. Any suggestions are welcome. Check out the blogs of Fili, Craig or the new Taiwan Photographers for some good examples of the things that can be done with WordPress.

Blogging is really about communicating and sharing information and it is important to use the best available tools to do this. I encourage other Taiwan bloggers to adopt WordPress.