I am abandoning my website template. My new, hosted website and blog are underway. My programmer had some delays, and my current website and blog are templates, so they're difficult to transfer to a hosting plan. Nevertheless, I will soon have the ability to set up landing pages for my new writing group and other programs, and all functions will be integrated smoothly.
For those of you who are using website templates, I highly recommend that you switch sooner rather than later to your own hosting plan. First, the sooner you do it, the less costly it will be. Transferring from a template to platform like WordPress and a hosting plan is not a do-it-yourself project. As many of you know, I just dig right into to creating website parts and I know a little HTML. But this transfer is a bear. I wish someone had told me to switch sooner.
So, do yourself a favor. If you don't have a website, host your site immediately. If any of you have website templates, transfer as soon as you can. The benefits are great.
Here are eight benefits to abandoning your template for a hosted website:
- You own your own website files.
- You own your own website framework, once purchased, and the prices are reasonable.
- You own your own domain name.
- You can transfer future websites and files easily through a straightforward FTP (File Transfer Protocol) process that's supposed to be quick (and just what we template users cannot use to transfer our websites).
- Your website and blog can have the same name if you use WordPress.
- You can combine your blog subscription form with your opt-in gift offer (I've been sending many of my ebooks out manually when people subscribed via the blog subscribe form rather than the website one.
- You can integrate your site more easily with social media.
- You have so much more flexibility over colors, backgrounds, heading fonts and styles, page layouts, backgrounds, and widgets to do so many things.
- You can set the headings and fonts once and forget about it. No fighting with the text editor anymore!
- An SEO tool is right below my blog entry--and checks what I do as I go.
- And so much more.
An SEO tool is right below my blog entry--and checks what I do as I go.
And so much more.
Those of you who have made the switch from a website template, what's your story? How did you transfer your site, and how do you like your new one?
