Welcome to the newly revamped blog, Dusting the Soul (formerly Creative Therapy). I’d been wanting to move over to WordPress for some time but it took quite a lot of planning to make sure all my old posts and comments could be imported. After a lot of hard work, I finally made it and I think it was well worth it.
There are a lot of changes which I’ve outlined below, but please rest assured that the content of the blog will remain the same. I’ll still be blogging about all things related to books, creative writing and art.
So, What’s New?
New design
Since the blog has migrated from Blogger to WordPress, I naturally had to redesign the whole layout. The blog template is the Tweak Me Theme by Nose Graze, which I can’t recommend highly enough. I’ve customised it with my own background, header and other layout images. I like the fact that I’m starting a new blogging year with a brand new look. I hope you like the new design-please leave some feedback in the comments!
New blog title
Since I had to redesign the layout anyway, I decided that now would be a great time to change the blog title. I liked the name Creative Therapy, but it didn’t really describe what the blog was about and could easily be mistaken for a mental health or psychology website rather than a creative blog, which didn’t help with SEO. I decided to go for a more obscure name that would stand out a little better. ‘Dusting the Soul’ was inspired by Pablo Picasso’s famous quote: “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
New domain
I changed the rather generic ‘avbrownblog.co.uk’ to a new domain that matches the blog title: www.curiousdaydreams.com. The old domain will automatically redirect to this one, so I shouldn’t lose any followers along the way, but you might want to update any bookmarks you have.
New comment system
I decided to ditch Disqus and use the in-built WordPress commenting system, which is simpler for readers to use and blends with the look of the blog. I wasn’t sure about it to begin with, but now I think it’s better than other comment systems.
Why Switch?
I used to love Blogger as it was so easy for me to use and it was the most common blogging platform ‘back in the day’. However, WordPress is becoming more and more popular now and it’s largely because of its flexibility. The choice of hundreds of developer plugins to install means that you can customise almost every aspect of the design you can think of, as well as easily manage SEO, comments, mailing lists, social media sharing and other tools. Blogger is great for beginners but the design and widget options are fairly limited in comparison.
Nose Graze lists some other reasons why it makes sense to switch to WordPress.
What do you Think?
I’d really appreciate feedback from my readers as to what you all think of the new name and look. If anything isn’t working properly, please let me know and I’ll get it fixed. Share your thoughts in the comments!
Leave a Reply