January 14, 2003

website versus blog - blog wins

Some housekeeping done around here today.

I'm in the process of taking down the website I've had for close to five years - WriteResources.com. Sitting on an Earthlink server costing me $17.95 a month, I hadn't updated the site in about as long as I've had it. It's all pretty old PR writing advice, written during the boom when advice about how strategic writing could make a difference to a business mattered. It borders on laughable now. But then, I was five years younger; clients had gobs of money to spend; the site seemed like a good idea, so I spent a weekend fiddling around and putting it online.

Then came the really fun business climate of survive-and-sustain, and WriteResources.com sat around. For a long time. Didn't seem so relevant anymore, but I liked my domain name and was too lazy to think about other ways to host it for free or cheap. At the same time, the site was a pain to update, so I didn't. I hated FTPing files up to the server. I didn't like working in HTML. To sum it up = websites? ick.

Next came blogging. The few hundred hits I'd gotten on my website over its lifetime didn't much compare to the couple hundred hits a day I was getting on allied (before my recent week-long break, that is. grrr.).

My not-until-page-two cameo on Google's "write resources" search results hardly compares to the nearly 6,000 Google results generated now just based on my name.

The $50 I pay blogger every year is a heck of a lot cheaper than $180 I was paying Earthlink annually for site.

At the same time, I couldn't bring myself to trash my Write Resources content completely. It's old, but here and there you'll find some good writing advice, once you sift through the horse pucky. I still use some of the sites' MS Word templates from time to time, too. Plus, well, the old thing has sentimental value to me. That's why I couldn't just toss it all.

So now the files live on George's Earthlink server, where his GES Productions site is, which I update rarely, but do occasionally fiddle with. With his business, there's enough reason to keep the GES Productions site active--it is his business name, although he now gets more activity on his blog now than his site.

Meanwhile, that old Write Resources site is now linked off the right sidebar here on allied.

My blog is now officially the entry way to my website.

Funny how things change.

By the way, the domain name WriteResources.com is now for sale, in case you're interested. ;-)