Keith Hayden.net is moving! Here's why

Wordpress.

Since 2017, I've slogged and sweat through endless tutorials, long load times, and confusing site updates. But that time has come to an end.

The issue that sent me packing? Storage space.

At the beginning of this year I decided to refocus my effort on using my website to showcase my writing and other creative work. This followed years of experimentation and discovery on increasingly difficult to manage social media platforms.

In January, I spent 2 weeks revamping my site from the ground up. For a while things were great. I published regular blogs posts, set up services, and even wrote an entire novella on the site with supporting media and graphics. Then on random day in mid-April everything changed.

It was from Jetpack, the service, that like many software products has silently expanded their offerings and jacked up their prices to match. The email was simple, but alarming.

YOUR ALMOST OVER YOUR STORAGE LIMIT OF 10GB!

Go here to upgrade.

Ugh. Like many adults in 2024, I'm already drowning in monthly subscriptions. Did I really want another one to support my growing website presence? Absolutely not.

I spent a day researching alternatives, but found nothing that would allow me to continue posting my collection of creative work that grows by the day.

So I went with a short-term solution: I started deleting previous content to make way for new things.

This worked for a few weeks. But soon, I found myself out of things I was willing to delete (my site only has 5 months worth of content on it!)

That was the last straw, that made me move here to Ghost.

While the process of migration is never fun, in the long run I see big advantages to the move.

The first is I'll be able to manage my email list from here, which will allow me to ditch my ConvertKit subscription (a service which I rarely use).

Next, it will allow me to create a membership around my creative work for those who want to learn from my processes.

I've made dozens of tutorials over the last two years. Some are documents, most are YouTube videos the algorithm saw little value in because my channel was too small to matter, a few are from my now defunct creative technology newsletter "The Creative Futurist". But I've reviewed many of these, and most are well-made and still very valuable to the right person. It's time to give them new life here.

I explored creating a membership in 2023. But after some quick research, I realized tacking on a membership plugin to my already chugging WordPress site would be an expensive technical task I was unwilling to undertake.

Since it's built in to the Ghost membership, it'll be much easier to implement here.

So far, I'm happy with the simplicity of Ghost. Yes, WordPress is the king of flexibility when it comes to web design, but my needs for a website a minimal.

Basically, I was looking for a place to showcase my creative work, teach aspiring creators to share stories, and find an easy way to monetize my efforts.

From the looks of it, I'll be able to do all of the above here.