My website- yes, the one you’re on at this very minute- has passed through a few different hosts since it’s birth. Trial and error was the name of my business game during my first year. I was a 19-year-old college dropout with a *tiny* bit of business knowledge. I had fiddled around with a lot and as my business grew, so did my website.

Newborn: Wix

When my site was first started, it was built on a drag-and-drop platform called Wix. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen one of their many ads with Charlize Theron before a Youtube video. The platform itself is incredibly easy to use. I was able to set up a shop and a blog, design a custom layout, upload my own fonts, and add my own widgets. Sounds great, right?

The major downside to the platform- one that I learned very early on- was that you couldn’t easily grow while using it. What does that mean? In the simplest, least techie terms, it wasn’t allowing me to reach my ideal clients through search engines. My website was basically hidden, so it was beyond hard to try and get people to visit my site.

Teenager: Squarespace

By the time my website was in its teenage phase (a couple of months into my business), I migrated my site to Squarespace, an easy to use website and marketing platform. Like Wix, Squarespace is a drag-and-drop website builder that is perfect for the beginner DIY entrepreneur (the one who wants to design their own site). It’s very easy to use and quite customizable. All of their tools are incredibly easy to set up and use- most of their pre-designed templates can be completely customized in a couple of hours. The platform, unlike Wix, helped my business reach the people I wanted to through Google- which was amazing. The major downside to this otherwise perfect platform was the customization options. A lot of the things you could do in Wix just couldn’t be done on Squarespace without multiple add-ons and hours of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). To get my site to look good, I ended up spending a lot of time messing with the CSS (and quite a few hours breaking the site).
After around six months on Squarespace, I decided it was time to move on to a bigger and better platform- one that would include the things I liked about both platforms.

Adult: Showit

Showit is, in my honest opinion, a gift from the creative gods. Designed for photographers and other creatives, this host is exactly what I needed. It combines the design freedom of Wix with the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools of Squarespace to create the holy grail of website host platforms. I use it to run everything for my business- my main site, podcast site, giveaway site, and all website templates in my shop- and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can easily customize the pages to match my branding, update the SEO settings so my site is easy to find on Google. I was able to upload custom fonts and elements, as well as add keywords and tags to my pages. What’s even better is that the platform integrates with WordPress to further boost your SEO and grow your site with their mass library of plugins.
It was a journey, but I couldn’t be happier with Showit and I highly recommend it to any creative entrepreneurs who are looking to get their own website built.

Want to hire someone to design your Showit site? I offer Showit templates starting at $69.99 as well as custom website builds starting at $1,200!
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