WHO IS EASY DIY WORDPRESS?

It all started in 2008 when I had a glimmer of an idea for a business and I wanted a website. The prices I quoted were way out of my budget so I decided to try and build a website myself. Back then I started with a builder called Mr Site. You could actually buy it in a box in shops!  It was good but fairly limited but that didn't matter, I loved it!

I found that I had an eye for design and I loved learning about SEO. Because I'd been quoted such high prices for a website I thought that there might be a market for lower priced web designers and so I built a website for a web design business. I charged just £199 for a 5 page website. Before I knew it, I had a client from America! She was an artist and wanted to showcase and sell her work. I was in business!

Work continued to flow to me, both via a local government scheme for start-ups that recommended me and also because my site was ranking in Google.

Mr Site to Moonfruit

As I got more complex requests I realised that Mr Site wasn't going to cut it anymore and in 2009 I moved to a brand new platform called Moonfruit. Moonfruit was leaps and bounds ahead of Mr Site and it was designed in such a way that made ranking in Google even easier.

As well as offering websites I also delivered classroom based Moonfruit training in London and Manchester and became a Moonfruit official reseller. One of my web design course attendees in London was a plumber. He took what he learned and went on to rank number one in Google in pretty much every single area of London after my training. I was very proud of him! Mind you, back then, there was what was called black hat and grey hat SEO and he was definitely wearing a grey hat!

Goodbye Moonfruit

Moonfruit had been owned by a husband and wife team and they had built it into a hugely successful, multi-million pound business. In 2012 they made the fateful decision to sell the business to Yell. For me, that meant that the writing was on the wall. It was also during the period when SSL's (security certificates - the padlock at the top left of a browser) were becoming an essential part of the web design world and Moonfruit was falling behind. I needed to find another platform.

At the time Moonfruit and Wix were pretty much neck and neck in terms of their builders. Moonfruit had been ahead for years but Wix was just starting to overtake them. However, for me, there were a few issues with Wix.

Firstly Wix sites had a reputation for being terrible for SEO and really hard to rank. This has changed in recent years and John Mueller, Google’s search advocate, said “Wix is fine for SEO. A few years back it was pretty bad in terms of SEO."

Secondly, I decided that I wanted complete control over my site forever. I never wanted to have to change builders again. I wanted to own the sites, not rent them from other platforms.

Thirdly, by the time I'd paid for all the Wix add ons I'd need, my clients would have much higher monthly fees than I'd be charging.

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