How To Think Sideways is going to change domains as well as software.
We’ll be moving to Holly Lisle Online Writing school.
And we’ll be adding some domains, because while HollyLisleOnlineWritingSchool.com is a good URL from an SEO standpoint, it’s a pain in the ass to type.
So HollyLisleOnlineWritingSchool.com
will be just the main page, surveys, and the shop,
HollyLisleOWS.com,
which will be class and workshop launches and split testing,
and HLOWS.com,
which will be the community and classrooms (’cause, dammit, SHORT NAMES MATTER)! And the stuff you’re going to have to use everyday if you’re active on the site is going to be EASY.
For a while you’ll have both the old logo and the transitional logo on the new site so folks can be sure they’re in the right spot.
Then the main transitional logo will be there by itself. I have no date yet on the move. Dan and I are both hauling ass, with me looking for reliable cloud server space at the moment, because TigerTech has been telling me for a while that I have outgrown them. UGH!
I’m drinking my damn tea, but with the shop dead, I’m not working any six hours a day at the moment.
Outgrown TigerTech? How sad to be leaving such a homey kind of place. I absolutely love TT.
As for the new server–I hear there’s a server going idle in Hillary Clinton’s basement. Downside is the cost is generally $300k per hour. 🙂
Enjoy the tea. Hint: green tea is pretty good iced, and goes well with lemon or lime.
I have shed some tears. Seriously. I never wanted to leave.
I’m keeping a couple of little sites on TT.
The one my son built as a school project when he was eleven and twelve (he’s almost eighteen now). A couple of tiny, static sites I’ll use for little promotions. Probably HollyLisle.net, which I use to break things while testing them.
There are some things I want to add to the site that I simply can’t do on a shared server, and TT only has shared servers.
I think I’ll pass on Hillary’s server, though. 😉
And iced green tea sounds awesome. Thanks. 😀
Holly, I give you a (y) on the new logos and the new school. Can hardly wait ’til all is up and running as needed.
I’m also glad that you’re trying hard to keep to your guns about watching your health. Hang in there. The redo has to stop sometime, if only because of vacation. 🙂
You may want to use yahoo as your hosting provider. Yes that does sound crazy at first but I have been using them since I got ad from the old geocities neighborhoods back in 2001… there are downsides but even the basic webhosting hosts a free instance of sql server. The most difacutly I had was getting permission to run some code for the bbc bulltenboard code. The sales people will likely tell you use the merchant packages but I have only had my domain go down five times in the fourteen years it has been up on the web… of course I’ve been something like ten to fifteen dollars a month for all that time.
good luck.
Benjamin
My hat’s off to you, Holly. So glad your health is okay. I.hate.Wordpress. Tried it with one of my websites – once. I attributed my failure with it to my own lack of knowledge. Maybe not. Anyway, do the changeover at the speed best for you. I like the new look and name. It fits. Wishing a smooth transition and much future success for you.
You’re going to keep the old domain and just redirect it to the new one, right? Cuz that way you won’t lose the folks who wander in from an outdated bookmark.
HowToThinkSideways.com is going to go back to being the course registration page for HTTS.
But, yes, we’re going to be forwarding old links to the new site.
We’ll do that here, too, when we move this to the new software. Domain will be the same, but we’ll be doing a LOT of link forwarding, considering there are links coming here to pages that went live on other systems in the late nineties.
Being a 40+ year IT guy, I know how much work is involved in this kind of project. There are 2 pressing issues, and they conflict each other….Getting it done as fast as possible, and getting it right. The faster you go, more mistakes will be made, the slower it goes, the “users” wait is longer. A hard, stressful balance to walk.
Personally, I would do the take it to the slower, make it right side….less issues to fix later, actually saving time in the long haul. But too slow, you miss the needed income to support your projects.
I look forward to see the new site and hope that everything goes smoothly. If you need a beta tester, call on me. I’m good at breaking things….LOL!!!
BJ
Yeah—that slower, make-it-right method was what we were doing.
Then WordPress broke my shop, and turned off a whole lot of my income. At which point it stopped being entirely about the user experience, and became about getting on working software before I can’t afford to pay the bills.
It’s a terrible headache for you, but this end I’m very excited to see the new site. I hope you’re recovering well from the surgery. All the best.
I had my own site once, and I had WP installed for it. It was one enormous headache. What’s so awful is I really do like WP so I’m using their free site. If I decide I need my own domain, I’ll work within their site so I don’t have the nightmares I’m sure you’ve experienced.
Hi, Glynis.
I used to love WordPress. It was easy to start, and it just worked.
Even now, as long as you use only the themes WordPress provides, and never extend their core software with plugins, you should be okay.
But if that’s what you want, you’ll never need your own domain, because there isn’t anything you can do with bare WordPress on your own site that you can’t do on the free site.
If you want to sell your own books from your site, or add a theme by a professional WordPress developer, you are instantly in the queue of people who are waiting for their sites to get broken.
If you aren’t actually counting on the money from the site, it’s no big deal.
If no one is counting on you to deliver courses they can actually buy, again, it’s no big deal. You wait, sooner or later someone will come up with a fix, and then you roll merrily along until something else breaks.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
But if you do anything with your site that actually matters to you, consider another platform.
Here’s why.
The MemberMouse folks are professional WordPress developers. That’s all they do. They make professional-grade business plugins for WordPress.
And they—and their thousands of customers who pay them every month to use their stuff—ALL got hammered in the same instant by an arbitrary change the WordPress folks made without telling anyone, including the people whose entire business is built around making plugins for WordPress, that they were going to make it.
I’m just grateful at this point that Dan and I were already well along in the process of building my escape route.
I saved the email in case I need it later on. I like the new logo. I’m in this weird, “make everything as white as possible or completely white!” theme in my life. Since my creativity has been boosted, I think it’s worthwhile, lol.
Glad to see you’re back. 🙂
For me, that clean white background was like spring cleaning back in Ohio when I was a kid.
You washed EVERYTHING and hung it out on the line to dry. The whole house smelled like PineSol and sunshine and green growing grass, you could see the first robins on the lawn, and the line of laundry was so bright it looked like the little clouds in the sky.
To me, those new (and possibly temporary) logos just mean “clean start.”
This is the clean start I’m looking for:
The writing classes people love on the fastest-loading software even for low-bandwidth users, in the easiest-to-use class design possible…
This site revamped with OneStep so I can keep up with everything…
ReadersMeetWriters.com live and running, helping writers build their careers.
All running on software that won’t ruin your day or mine.