Timely Insights on WordPress

A New Year and a new look!

Well, we’ve done it. We’ve left Timely Insights’ old hosting platform and moved to this new-fangled blog platform called WordPress.

I know that some of you might have given us kudos for sticking to the older and unique platform we had been running for more than three years. Rest assured, it wasn’t a hasty change and we didn’t do it to be like everyone else running WordPress – it will allow us to spend more time on writing and less on manipulating the site. We think this will work well for us as we continue on our mission here.

Our process through this change points out some things that in turn might help you understand your own processes, so I thought I’d share…

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Going with the crowd

Or rather – going against the crowd

When launching the blog for The LinkedIn Personal Trainer, I realized that I had to be able to do the entire process on my own. The setup from Timely Insights just wasn’t going to cut it – getting posts up on the site was a bit involved (at least it is from my point of view;-). [not just from your POV :) ~ed.] So we looked around and finally selected WordPress.

And I realized that one possible reason I had been avoiding a blog publishing platform for so long was because it was popular and ‘mainstream’ …

And yes, that’s generalizable… If everybody is wearing red, I’ll wear blue. If people are congregating around the appetizer trays, I’ll check out the deserts. If the most popular name for babies is Ashley, I’ll lobby for Zoe.

Part of this comes from my status as the youngest child – I had to stake out my own territory, but read more on that in my earlier entry on birth order;-)

This strategy may have worked well for me, but the real point is not to do what everyone else is (or isn’t) doing just to be part of the crowd, but to enjoy the things that you are doing.

But – you can’t be unique if you’re just like everyone else…

Getting your toes wet

I’ve run WordPress on The LinkedIn Personal Trainer for the majority of 2008, and can see that WordPress is one of the most popular blog platforms for a reason – it runs well. John has helped drop in updates and new widgets through the year and I’ve managed the writing, posting and commenting on the blog on my own.

Our experience has been very positive, so we considered it a try-out for TI.  By the time the year was over, it was natural to move the Timely Insights blog to WordPress as well. It’s a change in how we set things up, but we think we’ve kept the essential flavor of the site.

What hidden assumptions guide your behavior?

It’s quite possible that we stayed with a platform that wasn’t meeting our publishing needs longer than we might have justified because it fed our need to be unique, to go against the main stream.

Seeing this in hindsight was certainly a lesson for me.

Do any of your actions get influenced by factors you don’t think about that often?