Another example of a website running on a blogging platform

This weekend I converted the website for my CPA practice from GoDaddy to a blog at WordPress.

You can see the new site here.

I have some screen saves of the old site here, so you can see the small differences.

Why did I convert to a blog platform?

Here’s what I said on my website:

The website you are reading is set up using a WordPress blog platform.

Why? Ease of maintenance and lower cost. Better statistics are a fringe benefit.

I have found that using a blogging platform is less expensive. More importantly, it is far easier to change and keep current.

This site provides a live example of what it looks like to set up a basic, low-cost website. A sophisticated website is expensive. If your organization doesn’t need the complex stuff, you could instead set up a simple site.

Time:

It took me 3 hours to set up this website. Just under 2 hours was needed to transfer all the pages of text from another website and set up what you see here. It took just over another hour to edit all the pages. That rewrite was necessary and is not really a part of the setup.

Annual cost:

Here’s what it will cost me to run this website for a year:

$12 – domain name registration

$13 – redirect traffic into WordPress from registrar

$30 — skip ads WordPress would place on each page

$55 – estimated annual cost

Here’s what the previous website was costing:

$12 – domain name registration

$108 – website, with limit of 10 pages (was $90 two years ago)

$120 – annual cost

Maybe $65 isn’t that critical to you and maybe it is important. Far more significant is the…

Ease of maintenance:

If you are even moderately proficient at using word processing or worksheet software, you can quickly learn how to use WordPress or one of the other blogging platforms.

‘Pages’ on a blog are very easy to change.

Making any change to the previous website was very cumbersome. There was a moment delay when opening each page, a visible delay after selecting each item to change, a delay after recording each change, a longer delay to view the new change, and several minute delay to ‘publish’ the site so the changes would be visible on the internet.

Perhaps those many minutes for each typo and new sentence aren’t really a big deal, but they generated a lot of frustration for me.

As a result, my website was, shall we say, somewhat stale. It will be far easier to keep this website fresh

Statistics:

The GoDaddy platform for websites provides minimal stats. Maybe I just don’t understand, but the only thing I was able to do was install a cumulative page view count.

WordPress provides a decent amount of basic stats. Not close to what is available from a self-hosted site, but still fairly good. The extra info will be quite helpful.

Here are my previous posts:

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