1. SharePoint Blogging Template hasn’t improved – I’ve been waiting for SharePoint to improve the blog template with little improvement since 2007 or even 2003. I’m done waiting. Since Microsoft doesn’t really make money on the blogs, they haven’t really touched them. It is getting easier for me to write a blog post that looks good!
2. WordPress rocks! It is dominating the blogosphere and has incredible themes and is very easy to consume. For me it’s not much different. I add an extra step of ensuring I have a featured image and have good categories.
3. Comments actually work! I’ve been missing out on engagement. I hope people understand that now I can and will respond to constructive comments even on old posts.
4. SEO and Analytics integration – The SharePoint Analytics really got bad in 2013. I wrote about that and even did a webcast about that recently. I do really like the google web analytics and webmaster tools and with WordPress I can easily use both Bing and Google webmaster tools with ease. Amazing free plugins…
5. Responsive Web Design – I LOVE the responsive templates in WordPress and hope to bring some of these to the SharePoint community and by using the WordPress ones, I hope to better understand how to drive improvements into SharePoint based masterpages, themes and site templates. This means people can more easily read my blog on mobile, ipads, kindles and more.
No one should feel like I’ve abandoned SharePoint. I’m expanding my world, not unlike Mark Miller, Andrew Connell, and Jeremy Thake. I think that needs another blog for another time. I would personally recommend WordPress to any public SharePoint blogger or otherwise. Intranet bloggers it’s a longer story and more complicated with it depends.
I hear you… There are a few who have commented they’d like to hear how I did my migration. Let me know if this is still of interest. I did use a few simple WordPress plugins and ultimately a simple tool that Bjorn Furuknap developed.
A Side Note History Lesson
WordPress is Microsoft friendly! Did you know that Microsoft potentially moved hundreds of millions of bloggers to WordPress when they shut down their blogging platform? Why in the world did they just not buy wordpress? Would they have killed that too? I use to be a blogger on MSN Spaces which became Live Spaces, all bloggers had a short window to move their blogs to WordPress or be shut down. My got shut down because I missed the notification and didn’t realize the ramifications. Now only a few posts are available via the wayback machine.
This wikipedia quote on Live Spaces sums it up quite well…
“On September 27, 2010, Microsoft announced that it would discontinue Windows Live Spaces, and in partnership with Automattic, a free opt-in migration of user blogs to WordPress.com will be offered to Windows Live Spaces users. Beginning January 4, 2011, users were not able to make changes to Spaces, but contents were still viewable and downloadable. Windows Live Spaces was fully shut down on March 16, 2011.”