Website update: updated looks, new engine & better experience

You may, or may not, have noticed that there was no blog post pushed out on Monday. Over the weekend, I moved my website between platforms which took a while but was more painless than I initially expected. The website may have been misbehaving all the interim 24 hours after the migration, but it should mostly be smooth to use now.

Firstly, the biggest change is in user experience. We have moved across from WordPress hosting to Squarespace primarily motivated by the lack of features and design on the former - and the modernity of the latter. You’ll find better and more immersive animations, improved comments sections featuring reactions and more focus on imagery - making for a better experience for you, the reader. If you’re subscribed to email notifications of latest posts, then you’ll see they are also cleaner and a bit less cluttered than on the old platform.

In the background, the move to Squarespace will give me 360 insights into how articles are performing, which articles are getting the most engagement and how this popularity crosses over to social media. In all, it will allow me to see the articles you enjoy the most and make more content like that in the future.

My advice to anybody thinking of starting a blog is to do more research before choosing the platform and hosting provider. I jumped in with WordPress thinking it was the right solution for me - but I soon found it wasn’t, which cost me some money. Look at the feature set before buying and what you value in your website hosting provider and platform before clicking pay.

In the meantime, there may be some formatting issues with photographs on previous posts - I will slowly be going through and fixing these over the coming weeks.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to email notifications of new articles, please sign up below. Any previous subscribers have been migrated to the new platform.

And if you experience any issues or have feedback on the new site, please let me know on the form below.

Thanks again for supporting my blog and normal service will be resumed on Friday with a new post,

Callum