Elaine is... moving to Ghost from Squarespace
Hello there!
After spending the last three years trying to make my Squarespace website work for me, I've decided to move at least the blogging bits over to this new platform.
While I did enjoy the ease of Squarespace's website building features, ultimately - more than anything - I needed a place that was easy to get my blog on. And unfortunately Squarespace never managed to become that.
Here's why I'm moving to Ghost instead.
1) It's simple and fast!
While the simplicity does come with not really being able to do funky things like have columns or sub-menus or really too much in terms of font or color or other design choices... well, what were those choices really good for anyway? Besides, that is, causing the site to load slowly.
As someone plugged into the marketing world, I also know that most people are reading things and interacting with the internet on their phones anyway - so I might as well make it easier on them by inputting less doohickeys that might not show up quite right.
Additionally, and this may just be a "I'm in China and so the internet does weird things" problem, loading images onto Squarespace is what I imagine monks use to train patience. I ended up often writing in a word document in parallel to trying to load galleries, because loading galleries would take bizarre amounts of time, stop halfway through without letting you know there was an error, or pretend there was an error and then load anyway thereby causing you to accidentally double post a picture. Formatting would end up taking more time sometimes than the writing itself.
Oh also, there was no autosave. So sometimes when the formatting caused everything to freeze, I would have to do it all over again. 💀
Thankfully, this has not proved to be a problem in Ghost yet.
2) It's cheaper - especially if you're thinking of sending out a newsletter
Quite frankly, what sold me was finding out that to newsletter-ize my blog, I'd have to pay an extra $5 for the lowest tier of newsletter services at Squarespace. I was originally paying $144 a year (or $16 a month) to maintain my website without the newsletter add on.
The lowest tier here, which includes both this simple but usable website and the option to send its posts as newsletters, costs $9 a month.
Ultimately, considering I have no idea who will even be subscribing to this yet (hi, mom?) - I might as well go for an option that's a nice dinner's worth easier on the wallet.
3) I'm a sucker for a company with a non-profit mission
Okay, is that really that surprising? I'd assume it's kind of on brand for me to go with an option that wears its ethics on its sleeve.
I love the open source community. I love the idea of people experimenting with independent publishing. And I love the idea of a company growing but expecting to throw all of its profits into improving the product, rather than to people who have bought into profiting when the company "grows."
I'm crossing my fingers that I won't be reading an expose a couple months from now about how, actually, the founding members of ghost are low-key horrifying (admittedly from their pictures, they seem to be low key um... not diverse).
But for now, I'm sold on this idea.
Seriously ghost folks, please don't turn out to be hella problematic.
But what will happen to all the content from the last three years of your previous website?
I'm sure it'll be okay. I blogged so infrequently on that site that sometimes I even forgot it existed. The few things that were actually getting some good Google SEO, I'm sure I'll have no trouble migrating over here.
Everything else? Not super important, honestly.
The Squarespace site was created when, three years into my advertising agency job, I realized how much I missed writing things that weren't press releases. But I could never really clarify what I truly wanted to write about. So the blog became a hodgepodge of experiments:
- travel articles and restaurant reviews (many with info that's no longer relevant)
- food recipes and pop culture recommendations (which could probably benefit with some editing)
- and my portfolio of former written works (which... okay, maybe it's a bit of a pain to reformat all of that for here but I'll take the punch)
In any case, the few of you who did visit my squarespace site on the regs, don't worry! If anything, this will make keeping up with whatever it is I'm doing much easier.