It's been a minute since we've updated our web site, but it's not due to a lack of activity here behind the curtain at Original Abbie. For the past year, our team has been working on multiple projects ranging from our regular client work to a complete redesign of Destination Medford that is launching in the near future. Additionally, we've put together an amazing concept to accompany our work locally with Visit Burlco - a new tourism web site for our home county of Burlington County, New Jersey.
Relaunching Our Site
We originally explored relaunching our site with the site builder tools from our payment platform Square, but as we built on this new platform we found many of the limitations as a "deal breaker". Our team, shifting to focus on an increase in client work, shifted focus from fighting against these limits to work on other projects - leaving our web site redesign on a shelf. The issue, one that faces many small businesses and non-profit groups, is that site builder platforms like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, and the tools from vendors like GoDaddy & Square artificially force your online presence into a specific look, feel, and behavior to your visitors.
Our team initially began evaluating the open source content management system WordPress as a viable replacement earlier this year during the summer. However, WordPress has issues with bloat, plugin management, and potential security vulnerabilities that can create as many administrative tasks as it solves with easy page and post publishing. Additionally, recent changes in the WordPress open source ecosystem make the long term viability of building on a platform that may potentially fork into different code bases or arbitrarily force changes from a third party create a chilling effect for us to base our new site on WordPress.
Discovering Ghost
The developers at Galie Media, our family web infrastructure business, have been conveniently facing the same issues with their own site upgrades along with the same concerns on continuing to use WordPress as their web site platform. Their engineers introduced us to Ghost, an open source content management system that is highly performant and has a robust community to join as creative professionals.
Ghost is not WordPress, and there are limitations to certain features such as integrated e-commerce and connections with dedicated email list management suites like MailChimp. However, there are built-in features that balance these negatives including the ability to integrate a newsletter subscription service to share our experience and expertise without having to manage an additional platform such as Medium or Substack. We've been inspired by the idea to create a subscription newsletter to share our work with interested visitors - but have delayed moving forward with the idea since adding another platform to manage created overhead that did not fit with our current workload.
What about an Online Store?
Obviously, you're reading this as the first post on our new Ghost installation - launched out of staging after a series of tests that showed our team that this is the platform for us... but Ghost's capabilities for e-commerce, beyond the idea of integrating a Medium-style or Substack-style email subscription, are non-existent. However, we've found a companion application that includes extensive features as well as embraces our philosophy for using (and recommending) open source software tools - ThirtyBees. At the time of writing this post, we're completing testing in our creative staging environment before launching the production server to the public. We'll share our insights and processes in launching this store with our subscribers in the future - make sure that you join our newsletter to find out more.
Subscribing to Original Abbie
Finally, it's a new concept to have paid subscriptions on our site alongside the ability to sign up for free updates from our team. At first, we thought that it might be perceived as a negative until we took the idea apart in brainstorming sessions and compared to groups that hire Abbie for speaking engagements or our hosted workshop events that are ticketed. With the concept more comfortable after these comparisons, it was easy to see (and plan) the updates that we could share with paid subscribers without leaving our free members "in the dark". This will be an evolving process, and we will share everything with our members as the newsletter becomes part of our creative process.
When we first wrote "A New Canvas" during our site relaunch - we didn't realize that the evolution of our web site would follow the journey that it has followed over the past few months. However, our team is looking forward to sharing more about the lessons we have learned a well as how we'll explore the new tools that we've added into our studio portfolio.
