Thanks to having my old domain hostage by my previous host, whom I won’t name, and a hosting account active with no domain suddenly attached, I dusted off mmusgrove.com and made it the primary domain at the active host. I’m already taking a massive SEO hit, may as well fix a few other things while I’m at it.
I change my entire website around every few years anyway, and it was getting to be time. It’s usually a cataclysmic event, but not to this degree. In this case, I just replaced everything. Including the domain name. I’d love to have musgrove.com, but some Canadian has it, not even using it, and won’t give it up. So this is the shortest it’s going to get going the last-name-route.com as far as my personal website goes. I’ve had mmusgrove.com sitting around gathering dust for a while, so I’m glad to be using it for something. And unfortunately for the many people that depended on my past version, this site doesn’t have a free version of my Bootstrap Development book posted. I guess I could provide a Dropbox link, which makes more sense anyway. (* Note to Self.) That thing generates a lot of traffic, amazingly.
I’ll say this: setting up a WordPress website properly from scratch has become a seriously time-consuming process. It’s been a while since I started with a vanilla site, and there’s a lot more to it than just not too long ago. I’m surprised I’m not getting more calls to help people with that. Not that it’s complicated, but a lot of people that start these projects are business owners, who just don’t have the time for it, and especially to do it right. WordPress is a lot of things but user-friendly isn’t one of them. I was just pondering the other day how WordPress has an obvious design problem when there are so many 3rd party firms thriving that exist by building software and training videos to help people build websites with WordPress. It’s become a cottage industry.
It’s a still a far cry from setting up Ghost(which I’m a big fan of), but far more complicated than just hopping on Medium and hitting the gas. Which I’m also a big fan of. Depends how dirty you want to get your hands and how much control you want. Medium gives you a surprising amount of options, when you consider that you don’t really need the millions of options many “general purpose” WordPress themes offer. You can create a menu, add a header and logo, change the layout, add and embed all sorts of media easily and quickly, and Medium’s integrating and introducing new apps regularly.
So, from now on mmusgrove.com is going to be my personal website. When my host finally takes michaelmusgrove.com off blocks and allows me to re-license it at Google Domains in about 43 days, I’ll redirect that URL to this domain. And I still have michaelmusgrove.wordpress.com which is a free website that I just throw junk up on every now and then for no particular reason.
