Moving to Squarespace

After hosting my own WordPress blog for a while, I realized recently that I had not posted for almost a year. Oh, I’ve been writing—-to my customers, associates, friends, family… even drafts of blog posts. The problem is that I haven’t been publishing those drafts.

No, that’s not right; not publishing is the symptom, not the problem. The real problem, I thought, was that I didn’t know where to post new content.

I had a blog on my company website, where I published a few how-to articles based on customer experiences or my own interests. These were good articles, exemplifying the work I enjoy: consulting to guide people in their use of technology. Still, I didn’t do much publishing there either, and that blog has also languished.

My recent realization was that I wanted to post most of my content on my individual website—-on this domain, theterran.com—-but did not, because I couldn’t stand the site.

Don’t take that wrong; WordPress is a solid content management system used widely and to great effect. It wasn’t WordPress that I didn’t like, it was the design of my website.

I’m an infrastructure guy, not a designer. I can architect great solutions to technology problems, but putting on a nice interface requires the work of someone with design chops. My strengths lie elsewhere.

While I had looked at hosted platforms (including Squarespace) before, I never seriously considered a switch because I run my own web server and thought I should host my own blog.

Well, I’ve finally gotten over that. My challenge is the design, not the hosting. I need to remove that barrier and get on with writing and publishing.

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about Squarespace from podcasters on the 5by5 network. The timing was right. I gave it another look, and decided to make the jump.

Squarespace gives me a nice-looking website right out of the box, great tools for managing it, and really easy-to-use layout options. This way I can have a site that doesn’t keep me away, one where I actually want to post new content.

If this goes well, I can always work with a designer later to improve the look of the site even further.

So, here goes: theTerran 2.0, on Squarespace.