New Webflow Website, Yay!

We’ve been busy making lots of changes to my blog.  After more than seven years on the same web hosting platform I decided to move away from Squarespace to Webflow. To celebrate, I’m giving away a $50 Amazon eGift card. Read on to see how you can win.

3 Reasons I Moved from Squarespace to Webflow

There was a number of reasons why I made the change but here are my top three reasons:

1. Cost – Webflow was slightly cheaper than Squarespace and offered just as many features if not more.
2. Design flexibility - Squarespace provides some awesome templates, and modification is possible with custom code, but it became more difficult and complex each time I wanted to make a visual design change that was not part of the original template design.
3. Ownership of content – this became a huge issue when I realised that I couldn’t export the content easily if I ever wanted to move to another platform. While Squarespace does allow exporting to WordPress, it didn’t allow export in any other format.

Blogspot to Squarespace to Webflow

Webflow is the third web platform I’ve used.  When I started out blogging way back in 2009, I used Blogspot. This was fine when it was just me writing about my family’s adventures when we first moved to Canada.  At this stage, the main purpose of the blog was to keep family and friends back home inNew Zealand up to date.

Once I got more excited about blogging (and things settled back into ‘normal life’ in Canada),I decided I wanted more out of my blog. I wanted to share my projects, my recipes and my philosophy with theWorld.  At this stage, Squarespace was quite new and it was easy to create a more professional look, so I moved my blog.

Since then my site has had a couple of updates to the general look and feel but it’s basically had the same structure.

I decided that now was a good time to make another update, as things have changed and I wanted to share more. I’ve got lots of ideas that I want to share so, on the advice of my design team who had already been using Webflow on other projects, we made the jump and moved.

Migrating my Blog to Webflow

Webflow is not as ‘click and drag’ as Squarespace, it’s more tailored to web designers and developers, and this is exactly why it offers so much more creative freedom. The most difficult part of the process was the moving of all my posts over to Webflow. I have hundreds of posts and photos, and because of the limited exporting options available in Squarespace, we had to manually copy and paste each blog post into the Webflow Content Management System (CMS). Thanks to the fantastic efforts of my wonderful son Jesse and husband Andy and a few late nights we managed to move everything across.

Editor and Designer Views

I must say that I’m really enjoying working with Webflow’s Editor to write and update my blog posts.  Because Webflow allows us to build the CMS database exactly the way I want I can categories and tag the posts exactly the way I like. If we need to change it we can that flexibility is awesome!

Andy does all the design and development in the designer view and he keeps going on about what beautiful clean code Webflow generates.

The Editor makes it really easy to insert images and ensure they are in the correct position.  I used to struggle with getting text wrapping around images in Squarespace so this is a blessing.

Mobile Responsiveness

With my old Spuaresapce site my blog look great on mobile devices but again I was limited to the template design unless we added custom code and that always required lots of testing. Webflow is some much easier and we’re no longer limited to the limitations of a template and I really love the new mobile look.

Want to Move to Webflow?

Squarespace is still a great platform and their templates are really slick and professional, but if you want to take your website to the next level, then I can highly recommend Webflow, and if you need help with that move  you should drop my husband Andy an email.  Andy is an amazing designer who would be more than happy to discuss your design needs with you.

Amazon eGift Card Giveaway

To celebrate the launch of the new website I'm giving away a $50 Amazon eGift Card to one person. Use the sign-up form on this page and go in the draw . If you're already a subscriber on my mailing list  you can leave a comment on this ,or any other post, to enter the draw. I'll be making the draw on the 31st of October and will contact the winner by email.