My Experience With Domains and Websites

I've been paying a hefty sum to GoDaddy over the past 4 years for the domain, space, and Website Tonight management solution for my freelance company's website and for the domain on my personal website. After some thought, I decided to cancel my GoDaddy account this past week.

In the years that I've used the GoDaddy domain and Website Tonight services, I've been frustrated to no end by the user interface. It seems unnecessarily convoluted and incredibly bloated--a la Geocities back when Yahoo! purchased them in late 1998. It offers solid value, but in order to find what you're looking for, you almost need a treasure hunt map and tips on how to survive the deadly booby traps.

Items such as changing DNS and other drill-down management is severely dig click-intensive. However, as a plus, customer service is usually helpful, pleasant, and straight-forward if you're willing put up with moderate wait times on the phone. Also, if you purchase a multi-year renewal, your fee is much lower.

I'm all about simplifying my online presence and not adding complexity--or yet another thing to keep track of for my expenses. So now I'm two domains down, with one business left to promote. I was left to decide what my next step would be.

I decided that I wanted to continue promoting my freelance business online. I have a Facebook page, but I feel this is an ancillary tool, and wasn't really solid enough to stand on its own. I needed to identify some sort of service that could help me provide a home for my business, and the option to add dynamic content on a periodical basis, if I felt like it.

I decided to try Blogger. I've used it since 2005 and have stuck with it through a variety of UI changes, functionality upgrades, and even ownership changes. I felt it was as good a place as any to create a useful space for my freelance business and without racking my brain to figure out how to use the tool.

Blogger's Pages feature has made it an excellent avenue, along with the many customizable options for layouts, color schemes, and background themes. The navigation on the dashboard is very transparent and makes it easy to find things.

I'm not the only one who's noticed that there are benefits to using Blogger as a website creation tool (see here, here, and here as a start).

So we'll see how well the move over to Blogger, rather than a website, works out. If you're interested in seeing what I've done so far, check out http://fourtongues.blogspot.com