The Amazing Story of This Website

I’ve been doing creative writing here and there for several years. I decided to start this website as a creative writing outlet. Although I’m just starting this blog now, I’m backdating some of the posts so that it will not look like this blog is too new (even though it is).

I know from other attempts to enter the website world that starting a website can take a long time. I’ve tried to start a number of sites that haven’t gotten anywhere but that took a lot of time and effort to create. I wanted this one to be cheap and fast because, unlike these other websites, I don’t see this site as being anything other than a place for me to post the stories I write. If anyone finds them interesting, great!; if not, that’s fine too. So the bottom line is that I was not going to care too much about how it looked because this site is primarily for me. I just wanted the process to be fast, cheap, and result in a decent looking website.

So I looked for a simple website platform to set this all up. I checked out Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly. I went with Weebly based on some favorable online reviews from a website I don’t remember. It just came up on google.  I got everything set up on weebly (www.porcelainthronebooks.weebly.com) in probably 30 minutes. The actual set up process was outstandingly simple and enjoyable. I was pretty much ready to purchase an upgrade (the $8 basic plan) to make the site live on my domain.

But as I started posting blog entries, I had some concerns about limitations on the blog options. I felt like Weebly did not give you enough control. For instance, it does not allow tagging. Now, I don’t even know if I will use tagging at this point, but I don’t want to get a year into the blog and then find out that I wish I had the option.

So I thought that I would use Weebly for the static pages and link to a wordpress blog for the blog posts. I registered “porcelainthronebooks.wordpress.com” and started to move over the blog using copy-paste (because I couldn’t figure out another way). I was then going to try to blend the two sites together. I even set up a subdomain with my domain register, Godaddy, to point the blog to stories.porcelainthronebooks.com and paid $13 to WP to do the domain mapping. That all worked great on the technical side, but I was not please with the design. I couldn’t get the Weebly and WP sites to blend in a way that wasn’t, in my view, ghetto and awkward. Moreover, although $8 a month for Weebly is not that much, I didn’t really want to pay that amount if I was going to have to use another web platform along with it. This is particularly true since I already pay for a webhost plan through Hostgator anyway.

Therefore, I ended up deciding that I would just build the site through WordPress.org–which is what I was trying to avoid in the beginning. So I set up a new WP site (this one) through the Quick Install option at Hostgator. I chose a theme template by Optimizer and ended up creating my site the way I was trying to avoid. In the end, I happily discovered that the Optimizer theme I chose made the design process almost as easy as Weebly.

The last thing I did was migrate my posts from Weebly using the Weebly RSS feed Generator web app. I guess they also offer a plugin for WP, but I didn’t know about that. I just used the XML feed they generated in the RSS Import option.

So there you have it. Next time I start a website, I think I will just go straight to WP. Maybe another platform is right for you, but I’ve just gotten comfortable here and I’ll just stick with what I know.

If any of you have questions about this process or want some guidance on how to get all your stuff set up, let me know and I will help answer questions where I can!