Buyer’s Remorse (its ok) - Blog Post One

On an amazing trip in Bali, Indonesia

I am beyond thrilled that I tried and found Squarespace as a hosting and website for entrepreneurs and small businesses.  

We non-developer entrepreneurs need to have a certain amount of countrol, but if you are not super technical - who wants to stop, and learn how to develop a website?  Not I….

Well, I have learned the hard way.   And I want to make sure, no one makes this same mistake.

Starting a Website - going from Idea 2 Real

In an effort to be “online” with my business (I create tools and resources to teach children positive financial behavior at a young age), I sought out advice from various  “gig” entrepreneurs and marketing specialists.  

Many had their own special recipe for getting your website up fast.  Most of them had been doing this type of work for 5-10 years already.  

Some advice I received “Save your domain at GoDaddy, then hosting through BlueHost and search and buy a ‘professional’ looking theme on WordPress, and you are good”  or “Domain and Host through GoDaddy and get a WordPress site, find a developer who is good, and your “ready”. First, this was antiquated advice. Many website options have changed, and all of these companies have started making a killing to charge you for Support (which I fundamentally have a problem with).   But not knowing what I know now, I took those pieces of advice. 

As you can imagine, now after all of that - I’m going to tell you (the reader) I have found something much MUCH better. To setup a quick, clean, professional site, the current BEST option is Squarespace.  

Full disclosure, I hired a copy-writer to help me put my content together.  If you have all the content (that’s all the pages, images, and design together) - you can do EVERYTHING on Squarespace -  “the full thing” in 3-4 hours….and I LOVE IT! I love the themes and templates to choose from. They are amazing, beautiful, and SO SO easy to use.  

For me, WordPress is unnecessarily complicated compared to Squarespace.  In 2020, the least amount of complexity is best. Squarespace offers such an easy visual design and studio that my 6 year old son could probably figure out.  (If I can do it, anyone can!)

WHERE  I WENT WRONG….

I spent $69 for a WordPress theme “Coaching” from ThimPress.   It looked great in the demo. And even after I hired a developer on Fiverr ($100), who didn’t like the theme, but tried his best, parts of the theme design were still SUPER buggy.  So now I’m stuck with the hosting site that offers WordPress, I call Support, they tell me WordPress support is separate, and costs $20 a month. (OMG!) the cost of getting a US developer who quoted me $1490 for 7 hours.  So that’s a “no thank you” - I hadn’t even launched the site, and it wouldn’t work. Being completely dependent on a Developer or programmer seemed a huge risk. Therefore, I left my annual subscription on BlueHost (so I sunk $196) and switched over to Squarespace.  

I’m an entrepreneur, and I just want to make sure people can learn about my business and contact me.  Maybe pump out a blog or two...but having to go through 5 different plug-in’s so my site resembles the demo,  is extraordinary. Leave the complicated websites to massive corporations who have teams of people working for them.