I would not recommend abandoning a domain. Old domains may be valuable from both the view of search engines, though there is some dispute about that (see for instance, http://www.searchenginejournal.com/domain-age-how-important-is-it-for-seo/7296/).
From a user’s perspective, if they have the old domain bookmarked and you abandon that domain, you’ve lost a potential client/fan/friend.
I use the Redirection plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/) and I use it A LOT. I just checked and I have more than 55 redirects.
Many of these are pages that another Website has linked to incorrectly. (For instance, someone linked to “www.fialkoffconsulting.com/,” because of a coding mistake. If I didn’t redirect that to the home page, the user would get a 404 error and I would lose an inbound link (which helps with search engine presence).
Other times, I change the structure of my site. For instance, several months ago I moved the “Social Networks” category to the top-level navigation, rather than a subsection of “Online Marketing”. Doing that changed the URLs of each of the social networking pages. I used Redirection to fix that, so that anyone who bookmarked or linked to one of those pages ended up on the correct page.
Good questions!
-Josh

I am curious to find out what you think can be done better through cPanel that in WordPress. In my experience, the types of functions are quite different.

I prefer to access elements to both cPanel and WordPress plugins, such as the phpMyAdmin tools, from within WordPress out of convenience. It’s one less system I have to log in to, one less tab that I have to have open.

Plugins such as Admin Management Xtended perform functions which are completely separate from cPanel. Other plugins, such as Permalink Redirect, accomplish tasks which could be done through cPanel, but the latter method is more difficult and time consuming, in my view.

I used to use GoDaddy (which I completely despise now). Their tools are good for installing WordPress, but I did not find them helpful for administering existing installations. (They also have quite limited support for WordPress, so if something goes wrong while you are using their interface, you could be on your own).

My preference for using plugins rather than pure code is two fold.

First, plugins give me the ability to add functionality on my site which I would be hard pressed to code myself.

Second, plugins can so easily be deactivated that if I do see a reduction in performance, I can isolate the problem more quickly by deactivating plugins (one by one) than by parsing lots of code.

Thanks for your feedback!

-Josh

Also, I question your desire, despite a lack of coding know-how, to use too many plugins. I’ve heard plugins cut down on site performance rather than built into the code.

I just checked out Search Everything, but it says it’s compatible up to WordPress version 2.6.1 and I have 2.6.3. Lock Out is good up to 2.5.

Hopefully they’ll get updated soon…

-Josh

Lock out will allow you to keep search engines and anyone else out while you build your site (go to yoursite.com/wp-admin to log in while it’s locked).

Search Everything will improve the built in search, which in some cases would be better than using a Google site search. The last time I tried it there was a bug, where if you enable searching for tags or custom fields it stops working completely, but that might be fixed by now.