I blogged about the reasons why I ended up at Ghost. Comments and observations welcome.
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Man, I agree with this take. When I first launched my site, I used Wordpress and I was extremely disappointed, it was clunky and felt very bloated and complicated. I then moved it to Substack where it was good for a while but they lacked features and I never felt supported as a writer (and I hear it’s grown far far worse), since moving to Ghost, it’s been very smooth. Now I just need some traffic!
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I’m talking with a newspaper about possibly switching to Ghost now. To log into their WordPress admin area, it’s cramped with a multiple banners and notifications to upgrade and upsell. Although the publication looks like a lot of others, they have accumulated over 40 WordPress plugins.
Meanwhile, newsletter and subscriptions are a second class experience they struggle with.
Migrating over a thousand posts would be no small feat, but there’s now a lot of daylight between WordPress and Ghost to see the differences.
Actually, it’s the first ten posts that are hard. The last 990 (or even 9990 - looking at YOU, https://www.goldentoday.com) are generally ‘free’, because you’ve already worked out all the issues. :)
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True. That site could use an alternate dark mode logo. The current one is anti-aliased to white.
Agreed! I asked for one a couple times. :)
Tripoli theme / Aspire is making bank. I catwalk four-five themes for a client, and they choose Tripoli. Never fails. Well deserved, it’s a great theme, with excellent structure.
Yeah, I sent some example news sites to a potential client the other day, and was struggling to come up with some non-Tripoli examples. :)
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I’m with Cathy here. But more so. In my experience the first post was hard, the second easier, by the time I got to the third it was a breeze. After that it was all done. I don’t think I found a single issue in the other 1400 or so posts.
I’ve dealt with enough folks where the number was at least ten, because they did something subtly different every time. (Or switched it up every year on a ten year back-catalog.) :)
This is one of the few cases where being a one person operation pays off ;)
That is so true. I used to base my business on a wordpress frontend and a cloud hosted shop. We also ran an online publication using wordpress, and built sites for others while also using wordpress.
These days I have the ONE landing page still on wordpress, just because I did not get around to create a more chic page on our cloud hosted webshop.
Today I would not set up a wp site even at gun point. It turned into a clutter of a mess.
Just the other day I looked at the back end of my best friends new company website built on wordpress. It made me cry on her behalf. She will never ever be able to maintain that website by herself.
The webdesigner on the other hand is probably laughing all the way to the bank for the scam she put my friend through.