Need Help With Site

Hi gang,
I’m wondering if I could get some help with one of my sites. From a few years ago (about the time of the Florida algorithm update) up until last month our site was ranking #1 to #3 in Google for “Key West Church” very consistently. About 3 months ago we switched to a Wordpress blog hosted on our own servers so that others could contribute to the site without becoming html experts. The wording on the pages have not changed - we cut and pasted from the html to the blog so I would expect similar rankings.

About the time SearchWiki came out I noticed that the main page was nowhere to be found on Google. A clipclip (web clipping) piece I cut out awhile back ranks higher than our site and it’s on page 2. On page 3 is the page about our Pastors. I get similar results on Yahoo. I am #1 on live.com which makes me think they haven’t scanned my site and seen what the other 2 have.

I go to google and type site:covenantwordchurch.org to see what is listed and get 17 pages but none of them are the front page.

I enter “Whether you are visiting Key West and the Florida Keys” which is directly from our front page and Google sees no results. I can do the same for something from another page and I get the appropriate page.

If there is a robots.txt file I can’t find it. I have only 2 links to other sites and they are a daycare and missionary with no spammy stuff on either site.

I just realized this morning that I hadn’t updated the sitemap.xml for the Wordpress site so I have recreated that and notified Google and others. The odd thing is that the home page did not change addresses but all the other pages did… yet they rank somewhere and home doesn’t.

I have 3 questions:
1. What has knocked my home page in the head and taken it away?
2. Is there any negative to using Wordpress for a site?
3. Is it most likely the sitemap was so highly valued that the problem is the outdated sitemap?

Your insight is greatly appreciated.