I made the mistake of not having my WordPress blog self hosted. As you point out, the loss of links when you move and constraints on themes and plug ins has a huge impact on your chances of success. So after many errors and ‘learning opportunities” I am now reaping the benefits of a blog.

Now you want to do the same thing for gardening. You’ll create a new site at centralcoastgardening.com and you might or might not bring over blog posts about gardening from gardenwithchickens. It’s totally up to you if you want to bring over old posts. The main reason to do so is if you plan to get rid of the gardenwithchickens site. That way you preserve the material. Otherwise, if your not planning to take gardenwithchickens down, my recommendation would be to leave it there and put something on the home page and in the sidebar that directs people to your new centralcoastgardening.com site – and your BYHC site, as well, for that matter.

You can make a post to that effect with links to the two sites. I see that you are already doing so to some extent. Your gardenwithchickens site has built up a following – and some cache with search engines. So IMO the easy and SEO-savvy thing to do (if you’re concerned about that) is just to leave it up – with clear markers pointing to your new sites.

I did this with a Blogger blog back in ’07 http://mcbuzz.blogspot.com/ and it worked well. Sometimes, I still get traffic coming from that blog. It definitely saved me the headache of moving all the posts. And in terms of Search Engine Optimization, that would not have been a good idea anyway because all the links would have been lost.

If, for some reason, you were intent on hosting centralcoastgardening on WordPress.com, then there would be a simple solution to all this, namely, to use that domain for the site that’s now at gardenwithchickens.wordpress.com. That would solve the problem of directing people to the new site because gardenwithchickens.wordpress.com would redirect to centralcoastgardening.com. But, as I talk about in the post above, I strongly recommend that folks who are using a website or blog for anything more than just an idle pastime make the move to a self-hosted WordPress site. You will be glad you did because of all the added power and flexibility you get with self-hosted WordPress. There are a few more housekeeping things to take care of – like backing up your data – but it’s well worth the trouble.

Originally I had gardenwithchickens.wordpress.com. I created backyardhencam.com which has chickens only information (some from the gardenwithchickens.wordpress blog, some new). I realize now that I probably shouldn’t have transferred duplicates of the chicken blogs ove, but I did. The BYHC is in place, has it’s own theme and I like it. No changes needed.

Now, I want a garden only site. The domain will be centralcoastgardening. Should I transfer the gardening material from the gardenwithchicken site, or leave it and do an “all new” centralcoast gardening site with new material only? If so, how do I direct folks to the new site . I think there is a way without causing people to click through but I don’t know how?

Hope my question is more understandable. If I do the above, after I’ve created the new garden site, do I just leave the wordpress blog as is?

Now, about your new site. I need to understand exactly what you plan to do. Are you moving the backyardhencam.com site to the centralcoastgardening.com domain? I gather that’s not the case because it sounds like you plan to keep the backyardhencam.com site online at the backyardhencam.com domain.

What exactly will backyardhencam.com and centralcoastgardening.com have in common? I guess my main question is why would you need to move content from the former to the latter? If all they will have in common is the same theme, then you could create a new WordPress installation at centralcoastgardening.com and install the same theme. What else would you need to bring over from backyardhencam? (I do think you should not include byhc blog posts on centralcoastgardening, since, as you say, they are already online at the byhc site. The duplicate content would do you no good. You could simply direct centralcoast visitors to the byhc site to read them.)

Anyway, I’ve decided to do a second site with bluehost called centralcoastgardening.com. Can you direct me to a link (hopefully one of yours) that can tell me how to make a transfer. I will keep the same wordpress theme. Do you recommend that I take out the chicken blogs since they are duplicated in on backyardhencam. Should I leave the wordpress blog after transferring or let it die a slow death. Ugh…….
You’ve been very helpful. I thank you for your input.
Lee