Moving from Blogger to SquareSpace

My blog was hosted on Google's Blogger service since 2009. For three years, I saw big improvements to Blogger but for the last few months my feelings about Google's service were not very positive. First, my old blog looked pretty ugly. I tried to look at replacing the visual template but I could not settle on something. While doing my research for that, WordPress was constantly popping in my head. After all, www.ultpassmgr.com is a WordPress site hosted with Fatcow's hosting services. So I know a bit about WordPress but I feel it is too hacky for me.

I knew about another hosting platform possibility: SquareSpace. I've been checking their hosting services for about one year. I came across their iPad client last year and I was impressed by the possibilities of blogging on the go with a much better client than what was available for Blogger or WorPress. The downer was the pricing plans available. Blogger was free, SquareSpace wasn't. This week, things changed on the pricing front at SquareSpace. They simplified their offerings and made it a little bit cheaper. After spending a couple hours within the 14-days trial, I made the plunge and decided to buy a two years plan. 

The reasons behind my decision are many: 

1. The template editor is much more flexible on SquareSpace than on Blogger.
2. The look and functionalities of the post editor are more impressive on SquareSpace than Blogger or WordPress.
3. You can change 90% of the site visuals without doing CSS or HTML which is not the case with Blogger and WordPress. 
4. The media management is easier on SquareSpace than on WordPress. On Blogger, pictures are stored on Picasa.
5. After playing with SquareSpace Blog import feature, I was hapy to discover that my post tads, publishing date we're imported without any problem from Blogger.
6. Advertising with BuyAndSellAds was not as good as expected. I think that one of the reason for this (besides low visits count compared to other similar blogs) was the bad look of my site. I feel that if I can improve on the look, more advertisers will be willing to put ads for display.
7. I'm using Disqus as a discussion platform but it is rarely used and too much for my needs. Comment management on SquareSpace are integrated in the iPad client so it is a big plus for now (there is no comment moderation client on the iPad from Disqus - sad).

At the time of this writing, my new blog is still on Blogger. I'll do my DNS changes in a few days. But I wonder what will happen with my RSS feed: will it be transparent to the users? By how what margin my visit count was better by being hosted on Google's platform regarding indexation and discoverability? Will it deteriorate while being hosted on SquareSpace? We'll see.

I hope you enjoy the new look of Building iPhone Apps.  

Comments

[tracking a phone]

You may need to modify the code that builds your new URLs to match the Squarespace permalinks, but hopefully not, if it imports your blogger URLs without changing them.