The end of an era/The start of something new

Well. I’ve been blogging/messing around with a website since June 11, 2016. I started out on Wordpress and have played around with that for years and years. This year I decided I would try something new and see if I could streamline things. And by “this year” I mean I decided to do all this about 1 month out from giving birth to my daughter. 😬 Call it a weird nesting thing, call it mild psychosis, call it whatever you will, but I am pretty excited about the change. I moved everything over to Squarespace (as you can see) and I did so for a few reasons-

1. Squarespace includes webhosting

2. It easily allows online selling

3. You don’t have to pay for fancy themes

4. It manages your website domains if you have your own

5. It’s easy and quick to use

So! Welcome to my new Squarespace website! I am still lifeastice.com but now I’m being hosted from Squarespace. To refer back to point #1, the hosting feature included with Squarespace was highly attractive to me. I’ve been using an outside host (BlueHost) for YEARS and this year started noticing issues with my website's speed. After speaking to them and learning they were hosting my website on a shared server and couldn’t upgrade a few of my important things (trying not to get too technical here lol) because of that, and in being unable to do so, meant that my website’s speed couldn’t really be helped- I looked into another web host. I found a highly recommended one on Reddit and promptly (impulsively) switched to it. It’s a cloud server and I was in charge of a lot of things I did not even remotely understand. The switch also came with some unforeseen (to me) glitches in my website. I still have no idea what was causing them, even after going through their help desk and doing a lot of troubleshooting. I was still using Wordpress, and one of the glitches was that it would log me out randomly nearly every 4-7 minutes. It was INFURIATING. I’d be in the middle of building pages or writing a post and bam. Log out. I’d log back in and all my work would be gone. It would also just not show updates I had made?? New blog posts wouldn’t show up after I’d published them. New pages wouldn’t have the updates I’d made upon publishing, even after saving. Sometimes they would show up if I refreshed the page which was weird and led me down a rabbit hole of searching and learning about caching and such which was mind numbing. So. I looked for a solution and couldn’t find one. And then decided to streamline EVERYTHING into one place. We shall see if that was a good call or not. It’s very much a done deal now so I am REALLY hoping it was the right thing for me to do lol. Domains have been transferred. Content has been transferred. Everything else has been canceled. I may look back on this and be like YOU FOOL but it is what it is now. It was that or literally delete everything because of how completely and utterly unusable my site had become- and how absolutely ENRAGED by it all I had become. 

Moving on. Point #2 mentions online selling. I would love to get into this space somehow, so I’ve been brainstorming digital things to make/design/offer that would be helpful to people. More to come on this.

#3 is about fancy themes, and is also part of why I switched to Squarespace. I had just spent $70 on a theme for my Wordpress site and I am wondering if that’s part of what caused everything to implode. Word to the clueless like me- be careful with themes lol. I probably could have reverted everything to see if that was the issue or if my hosting was the issue but at this point I was done with ALL OF IT.

Domain management was something my web host was doing for me as well and learning that Squarespace could cover that as well was another drop in the YES bucket for me. That's reason #4.

Lastly- Squarespace is like. Stupid easy to use. There’s no coding, everything is pretty much just like fill in the blank type things, and it also has lots of tutorials to help beginners out. I am about to give birth to my second child (like 2 weeks from my due date as I write this) and I have a VERY active toddler in the house. I don’t have time for things to not work, or be hard to use, or require troubleshooting but I desperately wanted to continue/ start my website stuff back up again. I know the next few months aren’t going to allow much time for that but I just wanted to get things situated so that if I DID have a spare 5 min to bust out a blog post, that I could do it quickly and easily. And now I can. :) If you have any questions about Wordpress or Squarespace or which is better for what or questions about any of my reasons for switching, please leave a comment!! I’d love to chat about it. 

Thanks for reading! 

Jessica

Here's Derek and Maverick at Angel's Island Coffee this past weekend just for funsies. Mav had a strawberry banana smoothie and D and I had iced pumpkin spice lattes cause you know, 'tis the season and all. Cherishing these precious last moments as a family of 3!!