New Look Website and Blog -- coming soon for the Stairwell

OK when I say soon, not sure how soon the new website and blog will be up, but you will know as soon as I do.

Big ideas have been shared, big plans have been made and even bigger plans had to be set aside. We aren't computer geniuses here, and a recent foray into the minutiae, details and complications of drafting a new website from the ground up left us spinning in crop circles.

Say, what?

Pete and I needed to look at a simpler plug-our-content in option, so, it looks like a nice Wordpress theme or two will do it. We are waiting on our computer geniuses in our pocket -- Cypher Systems -- to start us off right. The when is in their hands now, but personally I can't wait to migrate this beast over.

I have to thank Blogger for everything, though. I stayed here longer than many, simply because it has served me so well with its ease of adding links, photos, embedding videos, etc.

Lately though, I feel held back by Blogger, rather than helped along. The analytics are sketchy and always have been. You can't dependably turn off your own hits to have a more accurate idea of how many visits the blog is getting. And they have never done anything about referral spam, except to suggesting comment moderation. The spammers are robots that try to leave fake comments with nasty links. Many months after I enabled comment moderation the spam comments slowed and then stopped altogether. Yay.

The deal breaker for me is that Blogger is not supported except by user community. We are left alone to try to solve our own problems without any developer assistance. I notice the same questions over and over in the forums -- leading me to believe that only new users are there and old-time bloggers like me may have moved on -- to Wordpress.

I hope Wordpress will give us a more up to date, professional look. I'm also hoping it will be faster and more mobile-friendly, and have other bells and whistles I can discover. A good sign is that professionals in all fields use Wordpress over Blogger.
Wish me luck!

Any advice would be very appreciated. We are doing this all on a nothing budget and are very lucky to have the generosity of Jason and his company supporting us as we go forward.