Behind the scenes

Hedgerow grasses

Our house is like many others, children going here, going there. Me taxi, boot polisher, roadie, and a few other titles too. School holidays officially started today, sadly we have only six short weeks of a loose schedule and no clock watching for going to meet the bus. I'll still be working but we have a family visit to California coming up and we'll be squeezing in day visits to other places too. Right now though we're taking a little breather and enjoying the warm weather we've been having for the last several weeks.

I've been working out how to fit this blog into our new life and make it more relevant to where we are now. It remains a good personal archive of what we've done and where we've gone as a family and also how enormously our lives have changed, which is natural. 

I considered leaving Typepad, wishing they'd catch up with competing platforms and offer more contemporary design solutions and better security. You may notice closed comments on old posts and monitoring of new ones – all down to outrageous amounts of spam. When I voiced my concerns and thoughts on leaving Typepad to their support staff they offered me a free upgrade which I appreciated, this will give me the option of using HTML and CSS to personalize it more.

Trying out a sweet pattern

So for time and financial reasons, I won't be migrating to another platform, I'll be giving Typepad another year, hoping they up their game. The site I'm developing for my work is on WordPress.org which is more important for investing time and money in. I've also designed sites on Squarespace for clients and have been really impressed with it. Importantly, their customer service is outstanding, great for small businesses who are a bit tech-shy and won't want to handle upgrades themselves down the road.

For the longest time I couldn't decide what to do, stay or go. So I thought I'd voice my reasoning here in case others are contemplating the same jump. I know Sonia did and moved over to Squarespace with beautiful results. She incorporated her Big Cartel shop in the new design really nicely too. Abby from While She Naps recently moved from Typepad to a WordPress.org site and has some great blog posts about her experiences; here's her latest which discusses going from Blogger to WordPress. Abby's new site is a real triumph, clearly worth the time and financial investment.

Finding shade on a hot day

Though I intend on getting back to this space more regularly, I can be found on Instagram almost daily. I will be back here very soon to show my results with a sweet pattern I recently purchased, you'll want to try it out too.

I hope you're loving summer as much as we are. 

Jx

Comments

[Cozy Memories]

Hello my friend !
So glad to read you ! I know what you mean for the platform changing, that's why I moved, but it was more for visual aspect matters. My shop is not integrated within the site, I wish it was possible but it'd require me to leave Bigcartel & to accept Stripe as payment platform only & this I don't want.
I know it's summer but as far as I'm concerned, I've been feeling that blogs are more & more deserted. I have much much less visits & comments than in the past. But I must remind myself that I write in my blog as an archive for myself too.
xoxoxo

[joanie]

I agree Sonia, about our blogs as archives, it's so fun to look back at the beginnings, I don't want to lose that.
I found Stripe a little strange but a client is using it successfully as they've integrated it for UK users now. Your Squarespace site is beautiful and I love your Big Cartel shop too, I'm sure there's no need for Stripe in your case at all.