My two week experiment was what I needed to think through my options. It took me about ten days before the lightbulb over my head went on. These were the main issues.
- I want a pretty website which means I don’t want to give up the featured image on each post. I tried it for a few days last week and I just hated the way this site looked.
- I want to write about current events throughout the day and week. I don’t want mess with graphics for them because it’s too time-consuming.
- I don’t want a second website.
- I don’t want people to avoid this website because they cannot deal with news and cultural stories right now.
- I suspect that this website is being penalized mightily for having conservative political content on it which is reflected in the fact that many of my non-political posts and products are no longer surfaced in search engines or have dropped dramatically. By removing the political and going to what search engines deem “acceptable” content I will probably see my site do better with search traffic.
In the end, I was able to accomplish meeting four of the five needs. There was no way to meet all five of those.
So here’s what we did. We cloned the website you are on right now down to every jot and tittle. We put that copy on a new domain that matches the name of the podcast I have already been doing. I’ve got the new site set up in a basic way. Now I’m starting the process of redirecting all of the relevant posts from this site to the new one. As I redirect each post, it will get deleted here. I hope to have this all done this week. When you check out the new website, you’ll be able to see which categories were moved over there. There are a lot of behind the scenes details to take care of this week.
The new site will be pure blogging. It doesn’t have a mailing list or anything yet so if you are interested in reading it, you’ll need to do the very old-fashioned thing and set a bookmark and pop by throughout the day. LOL! I will set up a mailing list, but I haven’t done it yet.
In the end, this was the only option. It was either a second website or stop writing about news, culture, and current events (and conspiracy theories!). A friend asked me how I was going to get that need met if I just deleted all of it off here which was my tentative plan at one point. She’s right. It’s a need for me and posting blurbs on Gab or Twitter will not be enough for me.
The thing that made it work was the ability to clone the site which made it very easy to do this. That epiphany I credit to the Lord.
And now that I’ll be free from the restraints of this website, I’ll write about other topics I haven’t ventured into. It should be fun!
I’ve put a link in each header menu to make it easy to jump from one site to the other for those who are so inclined. You can also find it right here: Sallie’s Rebuilding America.
I hope this solution works for everyone!
Leave a Reply