Why I switched from Typepad to Wordpress (Warning: Long!)

I like to think I was a relatively early adopter of blogging. I first started blogging in March of 2004, directly when I moved to London. It was a blog about being an expat in the UK which didn’t last very long. What I liked writing about most were restaurants and bars–with personal anecdotes mixed up in there. (This came as no surprise to my friends from grad school, where I regularly wrote about bars and restaurants to check out. But somehow, this came as a surprise to me.)

I liked Typepad a lot in the early years. They were so NICE. And there were real people behind their support team, and it was their duty to make you successful. It was all a good fit.

But the longer I blogged, the more I learned and the more I wanted to switch things up a bit. I made a list of the things I wanted:

Better Categories. That is, categories with heirarchy. When you’re running a blog like mine, it’s nice if you’re able to categorize something as France, but then introduce a sub-category like Paris or Biarritz. Typepad doesn’t let you do this.

XML Sitemap by Post. Typepad creates an XML sitemap by category, not by post. Contrast this with Wordpress, where the XML sitemap plugin specifically lets you leave out Categories and Tags to help you avoid submitting the same post twice. My point to Typepad–because I wrote them and talked to them about this one on a number of occasions–was that I had 850 posts but only 100 or so categories. I wanted my posts submitted to Google, not my categories. Submitting specific new posts would help me get indexed better and faster.

Integrating Twitter: Some of the newer blogs I was seeing had Twitter fully integrated. Meaning that if they posted a link to one of their blog posts on Twitter and someone responded, that showed up as a comment on their blog. I love this feature. More and more people are treating Twitter as an RSS reader, so it’s great to be able to capture Twitter replies as comments. (That being said, Twitoaster isn’t perfect. It seems to put all the Tweets at the bottom of the comments section instead of wrapping them in with the regular comments.)

301 Redirects: This was the big one. I made a huge mistake (HUGE) in ever calling my original blog Londonelicious. Firstly, no one could ever spell it. Secondly, I never considered that one day, I might not live in London anymore, that’s how committed I was to the life of an expat. So I wanted to rename my blog. But I also didn’t want to lose any traffic from Londonelicious because I had spent the last 6.5 years building the site. When I contacted Typepad about 301 redirecting Londonelicious.com to PassportDelicious.com, they had no idea what I was talking about and told me I’d have to talk to my hosting provider. (For those of you who don’t know what a 301 redirect is, it tells Google that your site has permanently moved from one domain to another. It’s suppposed to help you keep your Page Rank and general status in Google.) Wordpress, on the other hand, has a beautiful plugin for doing just this. Just Google 301 Redirects Typepad and you will see many people on Typepad with the same request.

More Ad Spaces: After blogging for 6.5 years, I was tired of my site being a black hole of money. I was on a Pro Unlimited Typepad subscription which cost me $149.50 a year. That’s $971.50 worth of blogging subscriptions over time. It was time to monetize. Typepad let me (somewhat) easily add an ad to my banner and sidebars, but I couldn’t add ads below/above posts without switching to Advanced Templates, which requires hand-coding which I am incapable of. (And related to Advanced Templates, quite some time ago, Typepad removed the ability to easily convert a basic template to an Advanced Template so you at least had a starting point. If I were to switch to Advanced Templates, I would have had to start from scratch. Completely.) In Wordpress, there are plugins for easily adding ads before/after posts.

More Ad Programs: I wanted to experiment with Adbeans and Skimlinks. Typepad–at least in the basic templates–wouldn’t let me. In Wordpress, there are plugins for this.

Typepad Support
I approached the Typepad team about most of these ideas. What was beginning to surprise me was the long delay in response–even though I was a “Pro Unlimited” user. Two or three days would sometimes elapse before I received any response, and if it wasn’t the response I wanted, I’d have to wait again for an update. In my day job at the time, I was managing more than 25 Web sites for a large financial services firm. So I felt Typepad’s pain in some ways regarding how difficult it could be to prioritize feature requests from users and still maintain a stable platform. But my company did what Typepad hasn’t yet (as far as I can tell): when it came time to add additional resources, we put them in India. It was amazing how much more we were able to accomplish this way. As an American, I have mixed feelings about this as it would be nice to hire local. But if you want to stay competitive, be responsive to customers, and keep your eye on the bottom line, dude, you have to do it.

The Typepad Meetup: Where It All Goes South
Lastly–and this is when it all went south for me–I randomly saw on Typepad that they were having a Meetup for Typepad folks in Chicago a while back. So I went. Figuring that I would be one of at least 20 or so bloggers. There were more like six. MAYBE eight. “How could this be,” I wondered? This is a large international platform.

I like math. Surely there must be at least 500 people in the Chicago area with blogs . A 2% turnout rate? To a free event. With 500 active Chicago bloggers being a low estimate? Hmmm.

So at the event, I asked them if they had e-mailed all their Chicago users to invite them. They said no, they hadn’t wanted to bother people.  (Now that’s marketing in action for you.) They also said they had put it in the monthly newsletter. To which I laughed. You mean the Typepad newsletter that you didn’t send between March and August of 2010? Interesting. (I went back and checked the November Newsletter–attractively titled “November Typepad Newsletter”–and yes, they did include a mention there.)

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction
I also noted that I had put a few questions out on Get Satisfaction and that no one had responded. To which they told me that they hadn’t been responsible for setting up Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction–the company–set it up for Typepad without their permission. The suggestion there was clearly that it therefore wasn’t Typepad’s responsibility to respond to my support request. To which I think I snorted. Loudly. (It was the Chardonnay talking.) And said something like, “Dudes, with all due respect, how the f*ck am I supposed to know that? The platform is there. Accepting questions. And I am 200% positive I have seen your staff on there answering questions. If you don’t want to have it as a forum, why don’t you make Get Satisfaction take the freaking thing down????” Blank looks. (I would like to note that I checked my email archives and on March 19, 2009, Typepad included a clear notification in their email newsletter that we Typepad users should use Get Satisfaction. So WTF?)

Another Glass of Chardonnay, Anyone?
And so then finally…I went through my list of “demands” with the two Typepad folks in attendance and they told me I was too advanced for a Typepad user and none of their other users were asking for any of the things that I was asking for. (The suggestion being that my suggestions were crap.) I politely responded that I did agree that I was an advanced user; I’d been on the platform for 6.5 years. Surely they should embrace suggestions from their most advanced users because we are ahead of the curve and everyone will be where we are now at some point in the future? More blank looks all around.  I quickly downed the rest of my Chardonnay and went home. And then I signed up for Wordpress.

I will note that Wordpress isn’t perfect either, and migrating a 6.5 year old blog from one platform to another is REALLY NOT FUN. More on that in a later post. But as a first step, I thought I’d tell you why I made the switch. In short, in the early years, I had a lot of fun on Typepad and would recommend it to anyone starting out. But if you think your needs might expand at any point, it’s best to look at other options.