My first attempt to move from WordPress (WP) hosting was at the beginning of November. That time I did some research on the WP themes. I actually went out and purchased a domain and hosting for my would be virtual home. I was not ready at the time to purchase one of the Premium themes, so I opted for a free WordPress theme.
I thought that I found one that was identical to what I have now on WordPress (Digg 3 Column by Small Potato). I am reasonably satisfied with it, as my goal for now is to have something fairly appealing and easy to manage. However the only version of this theme I could find was a different, probably previous version. Seems like Small Potato is not in the market anymore, probably he got ousted by Big Wigs in highly competitive WordPress themes design world 
At any rate, the theme I uploaded on my new hosting was missing a few of the functions I got used to. That’s why at that time I also looked at Premium WordPress themes, i.e. the ones that you have to purchase. I found a few that seemed quite promising in terms of easiness of customization. But as I said, I was not ready to spend money on this at the moment. So I put a free WordPress theme on my designated hosting and put the whole matter on hold. Primarily because my MBA obligations started to escalate and I had enough on my plate with classes, homework, mid-term finals and all other school-work-family stuff that I could not allocate sufficient time for blog tweeking.
The idea of finalizing my move during the winter break seemed viable at first, but in reality it did not pan out. This was holiday time, kids were on winter break from school, so time was used for other more engaging activities. However, this past weekend I decided I would make an attempt to move a bit further in this direction of changing the hosting for my blog. I revisited my internet bookmarks related to WordPress themes and some other web tips that I collected the first time around. I reviewed again what I learned last time and made my final decision on the Premium WordPress theme. I decided to go with one of the most popular themes- The Thesis Theme for WordPress.
It has enough customization options for someone who is not a web designer, like me. There is always something to improve in any product, but overall it meets my current needs. Moreover, the designer promises that the next version- Thesis 2.0 (current version is 1.6) will be something super duper extraordinary.
I have uploaded the theme on my hosting and imported my content from current blog there. For some reason the latest 15 posts did not make it to the outgoing exporting file. I will have to reproduce them manually. Even those post that did transfer, I am going to phase in gradually, while phasing out of the free WordPress hosting. So it is probably a matter of days, hopefully no more than a couple of weeks.
In the meanwhile I am playing with the color palette for my new site. So if you see different color scheme on different days, don’t get confused. It is still the same site. It is not being hacked, just gently tweeked by me This tweeking and transferring time may also mean that I will be posting a bit less often until I am done with transition.
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