Lay My Hat

one.com looks good too and extremely good value but you don't need to use the website builder. Remember that many hosts offer such a tool, often for beginners to get started but they can be fairly limited and you are under no obligation whatsoever to use it. I think even my host company provides a similar tool. Hosting companies will tend to offer a wide range of tools to help you out.

I'm getting CHF quoted here but the cheapest package would seem to be less than 20 Euros/year.

If you wanted to use Wordpress, which would make sense seeing as you have an established blog already, all you need is a single MySQL database. one.com offer this in their cheapest package. When they advertise "Wordpress" it simply means that they have an installer for it, which is fairly common. Wordpress can be setup on any host or even your own PC with or without an installer. The themes can then extend the basic functionality and give you a very powerful site development tool and the top ones have great support.

From a technical point of view, there should a way to import your existing blog posts into a new site based on a different theme. However, moving Wordpress databases around is not a simple task. You can keep your existing site while you build a new one and you can also export/import individual posts or pages.

Dumb question but would visitors then be redirected to the new domain if they go to my old wp site? Or would this be an entirely new one but I can copy and move pages/posts (sorry - in sure there's a more technical way to put that!) I don't mind creating new pages/posts - I think mine look way outdated and clunky anyway - but I wanted old guests to be able to reach me if they clicked a link in an old email or something. Maybe im overthinking. You have me a bit scared that if I go w an outside host, it will be really complicated to move the blog over.

If you want to start afresh then you could just leave the old blog running and add a note on every post that announces your new site and has a link to it. It depends on your theme, but there are usually navigation bars or side bars that you can add your own 'widgets' to. If you've got the Jet Pack plug-in then you can add a text widget that you can edit to do the job.

If you're likely to be duplicating any of the content on the new site then you'll need to add a code to the old versions to tell Google etc not to index it and just follow the links to the new site. Otherwise your site can get penalised in search results. Not an issue if you're planning on rewriting.

The NOINDEX code is fairly simple and I think there's somewhere in the WordPress dashboard where you can automatically add it to all your posts. If you go down that route let us know and I can check out the specifics (or someone else might remember how it's done).