New website, old content
I have a new website, although you might not quite notice the difference. That’s fair: not everyone focuses on the exact thumbnail alignment in the third block of their homepage. I do — for others.
I mean, it’s kind of my day job: for my clients, for my businesses, in my personal projects, I tend to focus a lot on web design. Because I love it, more than the actual content itself: my OCD thing is about structuring the space that I have before my eyes. In case you couldn’t make that up on your own, I like to control things. There is one exception to this rule: my startup, Sondz, where the designer in the team is much better at all of this than I am. I (still) know my limits.
The reason I switched websites is not for design purposes, though: the fact that there is little difference will tell you as much. No, the reason is technical. For several years now, I have been using Squarespace as my main platform for personal projects. It’s great for someone me, whose idea of coding is adding “margin-top” somewhere: you virtually don’t need to write a single line of code, the back office is extremely user friendly, and the end result is slick. The thing is, because I have been on the platform for so many years, they’ve evolved quite a bit since. A couple of years ago, they made a major architectural change when moving from version 7.0 to version 7.1. The reason they didn’t call it version 8 is beyond me as: that jump was so significant that you could not automatically migrate your content from one to the other…
That little bit of information right there meant that my lazy ass took a full 2 years to actually go ahead and switch. With good reason: this website is essentially a blog, meaning you’d have to migrate dozens of blog posts, if not more — I had my moments. A couple of weeks ago, on a rainy day and while my daughter was napping, I finally decided I would spend the couple of hours needed to copy/paste only the best content from the old to the new version. Then I added a few more posts. And then some. In the end, it took more like a day, and I actually kept dozens of posts. Which explains why it took more like a day.
And I still use Squarespace, even though they had me go through all of that: that’s how good the platform is…