I have spent SOO much time shooting myself in the foot, trying to figure out the best way to approach building my internet footprint and brand with the idea of future publication. I have moved to self-hosted WordPress, moved back to the free version of WordPress, and even started an experiment to see which I liked better–WordPress or Blogger? All of this was because I couldn’t make up my mind about how to present myself and my name. Well I found out very quickly that other than the readily available and free templates for use with Blogger, there wasn’t a whole lot to recommend it. WordPress just seems to be a more solid system, I’m well established here, and I wasted a whole lot of time the other day playing in photoshop to create the new header up there (which I think isn’t bad for a first try).
And then I decided I needed a new name for branding since Murder and Magnolias no longer made sense. My focus is not on Mississippi based romantic suspense/thrillers. It may wander back there eventually, but I know that won’t be for a while. Pot rightly pointed out that I should focus more on branding my NAME instead of the name of the blog and should look for something more generic–which, of course pulled me back to the question that started it all since I deleted my kaitnolan.wordpress.com blog and WordPress won’t give it back.
But WordPress does have this nifty little upgrade for domain mapping, which I recently found out meant that even though I could forward to my own domain (kaitnolan.com, which I still own), I would still be a part of the WordPress.com community and still have access to the benefits inherent to that–including the possibly related posts feature and tag surfing, etc. Booyah! Best of both worlds! For $10 a year (far cheaper than my hosting plan with GoDaddy), I can direct everything to kaitnolan.com and reap all the bennies from being back with WordPress.com. Sweet!
AND, whenever I do get published and need to have a full on website up, the domain is there, all my google stuff is already directed to kaitnolan.com, and I won’t have to deal with starting totally over like I did when I tried the self-hosting thing. Perfect. And best of all, this will allow me to brand my NAME no matter what genre I wind up making it in. Finally, an answer I can live with.