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Most of us who blog probably start out in similar ways. Perhaps we get a free blog at Blogger or LiveJournal and after a while we’ll decide to move on to something more customizable like Moveable Type or Wordpress. While it’s easy to start off with the out of the box features…you may eventually get the bug and want to start adding some of the nifty features that you see in the other blogs…or perhaps have a snazzy custom layout. But whenever you decide to dig deeper and supercharge your blog…here are a couple of tips (some of them learned the hard way during the redesign of this blog) that may help you out.

Know what you’re trying to accomplish- Take some time to plan out your upgrade before you begin. Have an idea of what theme you want to use, what new features you want to install before digging into the upgrade. One thing that delayed me a little bit was that I kept finding so many cool plugins and I want to try them all while I was in the middle of the redesign. I started making more progress once I narrowed down the features I wanted my blog to have.

Have a realistic timeframe- When I decided to do the upgrade I was hoping to get my whole thing done over a weekend. Well…we can all hope, can’t we? If you’re planning to tie the redesign of your blog to a specific event that has a deadline, perhaps your one or two year anniversary is coming up and you want to celebrate it with a new look, or you’re planning a big promotion that’s going to send people to your blog…be sure to give yourself plenty of time to get it done. Despite our best intentions, things happen, we screw something up during the upgrade and have to fix it…real life intrudes and we have to take care of something personal or business related…or sometimes we just vastly underestimate the time it will take to get the job done. Whatever you estimate it will take for your upgrade, double, maybe even triple that estimate. If you overestimate the time, the worst that can happen is that you finish early.

Back that thing up- Before you even touch anything on your blog, back it up. Back up your database, your themes, any plugins that you may have installed…everthing. The last thing you want is to make one wrong move or install a bad piece of software and lose months or even years worth of posts.

Work on a copy of your blog- When I was doing my upgrade, not only did I make back ups but I created a duplicate of my blog including the database and the theme on my server and made my upgrades on that copy. This was useful in several ways. One, you can make your changes without worrying that you’re going to blow up your current blog. If you’re using a copy of your actual database, you can see what your blog will look let in it’s new theme with real posts. One thing I found when I was doing this was that some of the pictures I have in some of my past blog posts were too big for my new theme. I made sure to resize those pictures before I launched my new blog.

Keep backing that thing up- If you are installing more than one plugin for your site, be sure to back up your database before installing each one. A lot of plugins makes changes to your database and if that particular plugin destroys something on your blog, you’ll have a fresh copy to go back to. The same thing is true if you’re customizing a pre-made theme. Before you start making changes, be sure to have a fresh copy on hand just in case you ruin the theme beyond all recognition.

After you launch your new blog keep a copy of your old blog for awhile- This is useful just in case there are some things that you had in your old blog that you forgot to activate in your new blog. Once I launched my new blog I found that my Feedburner feed was still pointing to my old blog after I did some poking around the old copy. I probably wouldn’t have caught that mistake if I had overwritten the old blog.

Launch your upgrade during off peak hours- My blog statistics showed me that the majority of my readers are from the U.S., so I switched the out the old blog for the new one at about 1:30 in the morning. That way if I messed up the switch it wouldn’t effect my readers too much. If you don’t want to do your switch in the middle of the night, prepare a page that says that you’re upgrading your blog and you should be back up shortly. Make this your index page so that will be the page that people will land on when they arrive at your blog. Once you’ve made the switch and tested out your new blog, remove the page and open up your new masterpiece!

If you can, monitor your 404 hits after you’re done- There’s a great plugin for Wordpress called 404 Notifier that notifies you every time someone hits your 404 page…otherwise known as the Oops! page because it’s the one that people get when they arrive at a page that’s no longer there. Although you should test your blog to make sure that all of your posts are still there, this plugin is good for catching those you miss.

If you have a tip I may have missed, leave a comment!