Category: WebsitesCategory: Websites

Social media platforms make it easy, right?

Easy to sign up! Easy to find your friends! Easy to post a video! One click purchase!

People LOVE “easy” on the internet.

How are we making it easy for our readers with our newsletters? Our websites? Our booking pages?

How many clicks are required to book you?

How many clicks to pre-order your new album or book?

This from Aral Balkan on Mastodon (via Pixel Envy):

When you post things on Instagram, Facebook, and X, this is what they look like to people who don’t use those platforms.

Take note restaurants and coffee shops and tattoo shops, etc. Folks who don’t use those platforms anymore might not be able to see your hours of business, your location, or your contact info.

A domain name from Hover (affiliate link) + a one page website can cost less than $200 a year, and it’s viewable by anyone with a smart phone.

If you want to get started making a simple landing page, a Linktree clone (like this one), or a portfolio sites, InfinityFree might be good if you’re just getting started.

A website doesn’t need to cost $25/month via Squarespace, or bog you down with admin duties tending to a dozen plugins.

Let your website tell your story. People hate being sold to, but they love buying.

Let people buy in to what you’re doing with your website.

I talk about “having a website” a lot, so I’m often asked, “what’s the ideal creator website service?”

I’m not so sure anymore.

The more I look at platforms like Squarespace, Cargo, Wix, Framer, Weebly, I can’t help but think of the square peg / round hole problem. That there’s no really “one size fits all” solution, and sometimes these “easy” website builders are complex – even to seasoned web professionals.

I started Social Media Escape Club in 2021 here on Substack. It wasn’t until 2025 that I finally landed on WordPress for my website because what I discovered is that I wanted a blog, and I wanted it to work in a familiar way and that was WordPress, the other blog set ups just don’t feel right to me. But I didn’t know in 2021 that I would end up at just “doing a blog.”

So it really helps to nail down what do you need the site to do, and how does it need to feel? Because if you hate using it (like I did with Squarespace), you’ll never use (I didn’t).

One thing about Substack is every newsletter you send is a “launch.” It’s to everyone, your whole audience! It can be intimidating, knowing that everything you write will be seen by 40% of the people you send it to.

Since I’ve set up this site, I find myself posting sometimes twice a day. It feels like my music blogging days, when I found an interesting band or quote, I’d dive into WordPress and just get something posted. That’s exactly what I’ve done today with this post!

Back in those days my music blog could get 5,000 visitors a day – hey, it was 2003!

Now, though, I can write on this site in relative “silence,” without thinking too much about typos or making sure each post is my absolute best.

So I was delighted when I found this quote from Tracy Durnell, (via the Josh Spector newsletter)

If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write. Blogs can help writers trick ourselves out of performance anxiety with lower stakes.

I think about it like this: you can do Morning Pages, which is private, and not for publication of course. Then there’s SENDING A NEWSLETTER. That’s public, that’s out there, it’s showtime!

The in-between is a blog.

It’s public, but… semi-public. Less public than let’s say Cory Doctorow, with his Pluralistic blog.

Have you seen him talk on stage for over an hour about Enshittification? He’s rattling off facts and figures and ideas like he’s reading from a script! Why? Because he writes so much everyday! He wrote a BOOK about it!

Go beyond the idea that you “need eyeballs” for your efforts to be worthwhile, and believe that writing about what you do in a lower stakes manner might be the best thing for your work.