Awhile back I tried setting up my own website and email capture. I hated the process. That’s a strong word, but it suits my feelings on the topic. 

First there is the initial confusion around wordpress.com vs wordpress.org. Then you have the different templates and plug-ins such as something called divvy that my friend recommended. I didn’t want my site to look like everyone else’s, but little did I know how difficult it would be to customize elements on the page. It’s much easier to just take it as-is. Why is all the editing done in some weird block format where I have to “view page” to see the actual result? I should be able to edit right on the page itself. I should be able to click and drag the corner of a box and it’s changed right on the page. I don’t want to punch in numbers in some box and keep “viewing page” to see the results. Old school people might remember Aldus Pagemaker, which is what is referred to as a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSWYG) editor. I have yet to see a WYSWYG tool that makes this happen for webpages. Don’t send me any suggestions. I’ve seen most of them. They all fail my standard of absolutely no coding.

Then you have email capture courtesy of Mailchimp, and all the set-up to connect it to the site and the back and forth to actually send updates to the email list. 

In the end, I never got a blog up and running. I never published a single article on the site. Part of it was wrong place and wrong time for the topic, but more of it was how cumbersome the tools were. I just want to write. 

Fast forward to present day where I launched a newsletter/webpage in a few hours on Substack. What a difference it makes to have the right tool for the job.