Blogging Woes 2: Farewell WordPress
In Blogging Woes 1: The Beginning of the Spin-Off Saga, we described our first attempts at maintaining a presence on WordPress.com. The woeing continues here, where we will reveal what finally made us give up and leave.
THE SNARKY CATS OF ULTHAR: CYBER EDITION
We didn't expect The Snarky Cats of Ulthar: Spicy Edition to have many views, but when our review of the Hellraiser remake got close to 0 views from real visitors (Fun Fact: WordPress.com stats count Google Search Console's checking of the URL as 2 views), we felt we needed to do something. Despite everything, we still wanted to access that mythical WordPress.com community, believing it would solve our views issues. We needed a collection of posts with a common theme and nothing that might be considered 'mature content'. The only thing we could think of was the Cyber Chronicles, posts where we discussed our online experiences (this and the other posts on blogging and Twitter were originally Cyber Chronicles which we updated and partly rewrote). We had actually started toying with the idea of putting all of them together on their own blog still on Blogger, and this seemed like a perfect fit. While they weren't the most popular posts at the main blog, they had views. So, why wouldn't the same thing happen over at WordPress.com? After all, this time we wouldn't be locked away from the rest of the community. And so, The Snarky Cats of Ulthar: Cyber Edition was born. We also took the opportunity to finally try the Lovecraft Theme, which, despite its name, doesn't look particularly original. Then again, our idea for this blog was very different from the main blog and A Goat 4 Zazzie - there would be no comic book characters. That blue circuit background we assembled on Canva was the only image we added. We decided to keep the profile pic so there'd be some connection to our other blogs and social media accounts.
We thought blue fitted well with the theme of the blog, and because we could never make the social links widget look good, we opted to use buttons to present them. For the title font, we of course picked Roboto. As you can see by this and other similar posts, we're not experts, and we're not providing easy-to-follow instructions for newbies on how to build your own blog. We also don't give advice on how to improve your SEO - we don't know how. Basically, we just share our blunders, complain about fugly blog Themes, and wonder what the hell is going on with social media. We actually like this last one a lot, and are very happy that our Blogging Feed (check the sidebar) picks up posts on microblogging, too. On top of that, we tend to write very long posts. So, who exactly was going to be interested in this? No one. The only post that had any views was one about Eurovision, and that's because it was Eurovision. We now had not 1 but 2 WordPress.com failures. However, like we wrote in Blogging Woes 1, we weren't ready to quit, yet.
THE BOOKISH CATS OF ULTHAR
We decided to give Cyber Edition a makeover and turn it into The Bookish Cats of Ulthar. This new blog would feature our reviews of Weird Fiction and Cosmic Horror books + short stories, and also the Making Of posts about our books that you can find in this blog, plus all any similar future posts. Our initial plan involved more generic genres, but later we decided to make it more niche. It seemed easy - we already have posts about those genres and we're always reviewing more short stories on social media. All we'd have to do would be to repurpose some of those reviews for the new blog and maybe the main one, too (we already did it with the most recent posts). Even better, we had an idea for how it would look like that would at least make it more interesting. As you can imagine, things didn't turn out as we'd planned.
Our vision for this new blog came from the AIFAMS Wiki and new version of The Bog Witch, a blog we created to test all of Blogger's Themes and decided to keep as a private repository of new ideas, pet peeves, and whatever catches our interest. Some of it may never see the light of day, others may be developed into full blog posts or original stories. To bring some order into this chaos, we made banners for each category of post and assigned each type of post a single label. Since this sidebar was empty, we put the banners there and added the links to each label. You can see how it turned out below.
We thought it would be fun if we did the same for The Bookish Cats of Ulthar. There was, however one little detail that we only noticed after we had already finished customizing the whole thing...
We switched Themes to the Baskerville 2 because the header image format seemed better, so, after changing the blog’s name, we started with it. We made 3 headers on Canva using the Twitter Header design. One was normal, the other two were the same width but shorter. The shortest just about fitted, though it lost bits below and above.
However, when we realized that smaller screens cut bits of the sides, we decided to give the Lovecraft another try. Its default header image is a mountain landscape, which seemed promising. We decided to use the original header.
There was almost room for Zazzie and the books, though they each had to shed a few bits to fit. We gave up and used a flame-only header and later we ended up deleting that, too. Next up, the homepage! We started by putting the category banners we made on Canva there, until we realized that most people would likely not see the homepage and go directly to individual posts. So, we brought back the sidebar and got rid of the blog title. We tried to get rid of the Navigation Menu, too, but the sidebar ended up looking longer than the homepage. The reason we put nothing on the Footer was because, for some reason, even the smallest Widget generated a big white bar that ruined the overall look. You can see the final, desktop version below. Every image on the sidebar is a link, including the header, which sends you back to the homepage. You can see both versions of the homepage.
Considering all the blogs we made with WordPress, the problem with our carefully composed design is something we should’ve been aware. However, due to those damned blocks, we tend to work on a desktop, and when we're previewing posts, we're usually worried about how the text looks. If we ever scrolled down on a tablet or mobile, it just didn't register. That we had just finished our little Blogger experiment didn't help. Because Blogger’s responsive Themes leave the Navigation Menu above the posts on smaller screens, while turning the sidebar into a hamburger menu. We often worry that people aren't seeing it, but all they have to do is click on the three bars to see the sidebar looking just like it does on a desktop. WordPress, on the other hand, turns the Navigation Menu into a hamburger menu and sends the sidebar to the bottom of the screen, below the homepage or post... If you're thinking it can't possibly be that bad, here's the the tablet view of The Bookish Cats of Ulthar next to the current sidebar of the renamed The Snarky Cats of Ulthar: Weird Fiction.
How? Why? Seriously, why? We're guessing that on a mobile there are no margins and the images are centred, but it would still look awful. We googled about WordPress Themes that turned the sidebar into a hamburger menu like Blogger, but all we found was stuff about plugins and adding code. We tried, we really did, but then something broke and we finally gave up. After deleting all posts and media, we deleted our account. While doing it, we were warned that we wouldn't be able to use that email address to start a new account for the next thirty days. Yeah, we think we'll be fine. Unless Blogger dies, we won't be going back there.
WORDPRESS: BETTER OR JUST MORE POPULAR?
One of the things that really annoys us when reading articles about free blogging platforms is how quickly they jump to 'Well, with Blogger you can do this, but WordPress’s paid plans let you do this'. No, just no! This isn't about what you can do if you pay - it's about what you can do if you don't. This, of course, also allows them to mention how Wix's first paid tier is more expensive than WordPress’s. Except Wix's Free Plan allows for way more customization and you can upload videos. Yes, it offers less storage space, but depending on the type of blog, maybe that space is enough. The Wix URL is, of course, super intrusive, but these blogspot.com and wordpress.com URLs don't look that professional either. Thankfully, WordPress’s cheapest paid plan lets you add a custom domain name for only $4 a month. Yes, it costs that little to trick people into thinking you know what you're doing. Honestly, if the people who side eye those other URLs let themselves be fooled by $4 a month, maybe it's us who should be side eyeing them. By the way, you can only access those famous WordPress plugins if you opt for at least the Business Plan at $25 a month. Wix's Free Plan, on the other hand, allows you to add plugins, theirs and from third parties. Maybe, we should spend a little more time comparing those rather than going straight to the paid plans. Of course, we have one of the dreaded unprofessional URLs, so what do we know. And let's not forget all the times WordPress.org is mentioned, even though it's a software and not a blogging platform. Naturally, this means that the reviewers can mention all the millions of websites that use WordPress, which is very impressive but not quite the same as how many people are on WordPress.com. So, is WordPress popular because it's the best, or is it considered the best because it's popular?
We're going to be jerks now, but we have the feeling that there are two extremes at play here. On one end, there are the coders who don't mind shelling out for one of the paid plans to be able to do more in depth changes. On the other end, you have people who can't do anything and just want something that looks like a real site. We know how that feels because we remember how amazed we were when we started our very first blog. It was self-hosted, so we had way more options - more Themes to choose from, plugins to add, and the ability to change a lot - but we barely used any. We just added our images to a carousel, and changed a few colours and fonts. Of course it looked good - the Themes had been made by pros. In hindsight, it lacked personality and it actually looked boring, which is a bit embarrassing since we’re comic book creators and should've had a more artistic vision. Our current Blogger blogs look a lot better and we didn't have to pay for any of them. Yes, creativity has its limits, as seen in the homepage photos in this very post, but it’s still the most important.
FAREWELL WORDPRESS
So, we finally left. The only thing we'll miss is the easiness of aligning image + text. Since clearly we're not WordPress material, we'll be staying on cheap Blogger, which let's you replace the blog’s title + tagline with an image and then resizes it for different screens. Since we gave up on WordPress.com, there is no need to make another spin-off, but we're immature and bitchy and Blogger lets you make up to one hundred blogs, and so we remade the very short-lived The Bookish Cats of Ulthar just to see how it looked.
