Why move to Ghost?

I got a lot of messages after my move to Ghost Pro from Squarespace (after being there almost 15 years). I figured it made sense to post the reasons publicly. So, here goes.

Better Experience

Yes, you pay a lot more. But, you’re paying for the time saved toward producing something. You’re also paying to automate a myriad of things you don’t want to do.

Ghost Pro offered a simple interface where a you just write, and your writing magically distributes to many places and audiences at once, in their preferred formats, without any further action. Other hosts claim to offer this. Ghost is the first I’ve found that actually does it.

It’s a personal site, blog, newsletter, membership site, and social media planning app in one. There’s one source of true — one place to be your best, while still being everywhere else. It’s pretty much what Seth Godin has had for two decades. But he’s Seth Godin and I’m not.

Better process

Ghost fits best with my publishing principles. It focuses on the most important part of the process: the practice of creating with consistency. It’s the part that my brain wants to fight the most.

It takes design mostly out of the equation. I fiddle with design too much, and I’m a terrible designer. That’s a bad combo. The lack of design decisions needed in Ghost is a plus for me, but I know it will turn some people off.

There’s still a lot broken from the move, but I see the light at the end of tunnel. Hang in there.

Better company

Ghost, as a company is focused on writers and publishers. Lots of other CMS companies start by wooing writers, then move along to more profitable clients.  So far, I see none of that thinking at Ghost.

The support at Ghost has been very kind. I have way too much content to port to any new CMS. They did it anyway. In the process, they converted all that silo’d, proprietary, locked-up content into a database that can be manipulated and moved at will. This was worth the price of admission alone.

Better go

So far, so good. I’ll keep reporting back as I experiment around here. Thanks for reading!