The Only Constant Is Change

I don't mean to get all fortune cookie 🥠 on you, but this is true. I find the closer I get to leaving Wichita, the more chaos seems to pop up. The more I clear my physical space, the more internal issues pop up to be processed & dealt with.

One such issue is DestinyArchitecture.com.  

I've had this site for seven years and it's hosted on Squarespace. It was there for me as I transitioned from "You Deserve Reiki" to what is now Destiny Architecture®—a trademarked home for my yoga, meditation, and Reiki teaching (alongside the coaching I've done since 2015!)

If you're not a content creator, this may bore you. But if you are, read on about a cautionary tale...

I just found out I'm on Squarespace 7.0 and to get the features I want so that I can release the meditation course I've created for you, I need to be on version 7.1. This means I have to duplicate the entire website, manually, page by page.

That's right—I have to duplicate 7 years of content by hand or pay someone ~$2,000 to do it.

Needless to say, I'm doing neither the tedious nor expensive.

I'll bid farewell to Squarespace since it can't meet my needs. It's time. But what to do with SEVEN YEARS' WORTH OF CONTENT? 🤯🤯🤯

So here's the plan:

⭐️  I recently pruned 320 podcasts from the Destiny Architecture RSS feed; most of those were prior to the trademark and were called "The Fearless 5." Squarespace doesn't know who they're dealing with; I am unafraid to "kill my darlings."

🌙 I'll move the best content from the past 7 years to the publishing-oriented site I host on Ghost, which you either read via your inbox or on DestinyArchitecture.net.

🧘‍♀ DestinyArchitecture.com will be reborn into something that will better serve you—with courses, downloads, yoga, Reiki, and coaching content you have always followed me to get. ️

💥 Your experience won't change; in fact, it will improve. 💫

Lessons You Can Take Away:

👩‍🏫 After 9 years of running a Reiki business, 7 years of Destiny Architecture, and countless years of creating online content, I know one thing. JUST START. Don't wait for the "perfect" website with the "best" pricing plan and features. Just shoot and ask questions later.

You're going to change, blow things out, kill your darlings, your cheese will be moved, and so on.

Don't let fear of "doing it wrong" hold you back. You're going to have to change & grow later anyway. Your audience will grow, your needs will change, you'll evolve, and software is constantly in flux.

Every time I log into a SaaS I love, there's a name change, a price hike, or a feature loss. (Or all of that!)

So what do you do?

🏀 If you want to create content, make sure you own it. I own my domains & trademark so I can always take my ball and go to another court. Create a mailing list you own. Create things you own that you can take with you.

Social media changes. Trends come and go. But owning DestinyArchitecture.com lets me take it anywhere. I own my mailing list, which I built in an organic & ethical way—one person at a time.

🧮 Periodically audit your tech stack. Does it still meet your needs? Have its capabilities changed? Did you lose a feature that makes a subscription not worth it?

I wanted the Squarespace course creator tool. I can't have it because I'm on version 7.0 and I need to be on version 7.1. I had no idea that mattered and there was no warning from the software company that I shouldn't buy the course add-on because it wouldn't work. (Luckily, they quickly refunded my $12).

📦 Be ready to move. I'm fortunately pretty organized with my video content, thanks to that year of TV journalism. But what the heck am I going to do with 7 years of blogs?

Kill them. I'm going to kill them.

I'll save some and republish them. But I never saved them in a central location. They've been cobbled together from disparate tools like Ulysses, Pages, Scrivener, Google Sheets, Typeshare, and more.

😔 Because of all this, I wouldn't recommend Squarespace. A longtime customer like me should have been offered version 7.1 before it became generally available.

In short, my loyalty should have been rewarded instead of punished.

If you have Squarespace, proceed with caution. ⚠️ Figure out which version you have and if it meets your needs going forward—or if you're in the same boat as I am.

However, if you're new to it, they've designed it for you, The New User. You may be OK. But who's to say whether or not they won't do this to you, too, in 7 years? Ouch. 🤕  It doesn't seem worth the risk.

👻 I do recommend open-source Ghost for publishing & managing a bare-bones newsletter. It's a bit weak on segmenting, but I prefer its simplicity to ConvertKit and MailChimp. I never tried the trendy Beehiiv.

Ghost lets me write, publish, send a newsletter, and offer a paid tier for members. Thank you for being here and reading the work I produce with it!

Enjoy the litany of blog posts that are about to be republished here...