Hello world! from venkateshsridhar.com :)

Hi all,

I have decided to take the plunge and have decided to move to a website of my own – http://www.venkateshsridhar.com and have decided to use WordPress as my blogging platform. My previous blog link – http://insidevenky.blogspot.com will redirect to this website and I will be making all changes here.

So, why did I do this??

Now you may ponder as to why did I need a website when I rarely used to blog, here are my reasons:

1. I felt I cannot be a thought leader that I wanted to be via blogging and hence I decided it was time to move to my own domain name and to run a more effective blog (I hope !)
2. I felt I needed to brand myself and blogging is one very effective way of branding yourself.
3. I always wanted a website of my own so I was fulfilling almost a childhood dream here.

I decided to host my website with SiteGround as they provided a bunch of other CMS tools if I was not happy with WordPress and the fact that hosting was a mere $5.95 per month for hold it, a 750 GB, yes Ladies and Gentlemen Gigabytes space , 7500 GB traffic :D and they had thrown in a free domain name as well, so all in all it was a great deal and I am pretty happy to have signed up with them. Their customer support personnel was good and helped me set up the website in a jiffy. It was really easy apart from the fact that I had email them my passport copy and signed form to ensure that the transaction was not a forged one, it was an irritating thing but from a security perspective I have no complaints.

The decision to move to WordPress was because of the following:

1. Has a lot of themes plus built in features which I was trying to achieve on Blogger and never could. Features like:
   • Expandable Posts
   • Themes
   • Plug Ins
2. I could easily import all of my posts, comments and categories from Blogger in a max of 4 clicks as compared to a long winding procedure on other CMS platforms.
3. I wanted to host the blog elsewhere and not on a free blog site, I felt I would have more editorial control that way and I was looking at CMS content so I could have more than a blog and usability was my top priority did not want to waste my time learning new stuff, so decided to go with WordPress because of the lack of a steep learning curve and the usability factor.

So, Am I going to change anything apart from the hope that I will post more. The answer is yes, these are the things I am going to do:

1. I am going to make it very easy for people to recommend my blog to others, will add a lot of social bookmarking features.
2. My themes are going to look good, please be patient, I just got the domain and web hosting set up today.
3. I am going to actively pursue SEO so that I am aggressively marketing the blog and thereby aggressively marketing brand ‘Venkatesh Sridhar‘.

P.S: I am sure you might have noticed the Read More tag. This was one of the things I was trying to achieve in Blogger and could not and was a source of frustration, so I moved on.