Trying To Fall In Love With My Blog Again

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Ever since the whole fiasco of my wanting to migrate to Wordpress last week, I found myself having a hard time to write on my blog. I want to write, just not on my blog. Not on Blogger anymore

I kept revisiting netkl.com contemplating to purchase the mySilver X package for self-hosted Wordpress. I even messaged the customer service asking them about my domain and if I can transfer my current domain to mySilver X so I don't have to pay for hosting and domain separately. Turns out I can

I found a new gorgeous blog design that I like for Wordpress but I did browse through Etsy and found a few inexpensive ones just in case I became impulsive and decided to migrate immediately. I'm jealous of those who took the plunge and migrated their blogs because I feel like they can do so much more with their new platform while I'm stuck with this goddamn Blogger where trying to add a dropdown menu for Pages needed you to spend at least an hour to find a suitable tutorial that ended up not working so you have to use your experience of 8 years with Blogger codings to make it work. What. The hell. (It happened. Check out my About dropdown.)
But using Wordpress means you're responsible for everything including making sure that your server is online and your blog is still under bandwidth limit because God forbid your blog had to go offline because you've reached bandwidth before the end of the month. You will have to pay for extra GB of bandwidth and if you're not making money of your blog, then it's honestly not worth it unless if you don't mind to spend money on your blog without getting something in return

So here I am, in my bed, after a long and busy day outside, writing this post and trying to reason with myself that I don't need a shiny new template on a shiny new platform that may cost me almost half a thousand to set up

I don't, do I

I mean, Blogger is easy — Blogger is free and the templates are not as expensive as Wordpress's. Sure the features are limited but do I really need all of those features? Okay maybe I do but do I desperately need those features that if I don't have them I wouldn't be able to blog? Well, not really

That's where my dilemma comes in. In between wanting to try something new and staying with what I'm already comfortable with

For now, I'm choosing to fall in love again with what I already have. In this particular case, my Blogger blog and what it has succeeded in 8 months

I have a domain — there's nothing new with this. I created www.erinazmir.com on July 2015 for my Tumblr blog which I then moved to Blogger. I've always hated the dot blogspot dot com so I had to get my own domain no matter what

I've reached 56.000 pageviews and 300 followers — it's not much but I am an English blog based in a Malay-speaking country where English blogs are not being acknowledged all that much (I received more emails from overseas brands asking for collaboration than locals' — that's saying a lot) so I kind of knew beforehand that I won't be the next Cik Epal or Fatin Liyana or Maria Elena with husband and babies

My template — is still relatively new. I've only been using it for a month and I haven't done anything major to it yet aside from changing body font and adjusting width of the post. I love tweaking templates but I spent a lot of money on this one so I kinda prefer it to look like the demo version no matter how much I want to incorporate Montserrat and Oswald and pink tab menu background on my blog

Lastly, my posts — I'm proud of what I have written. My era of posting tens rubbish posts everyday has ended years ago when doing blog tutorials would make your blog famous. Blogging community is already saturated as it is so there's no room for making obvious mistakes if you want your blog to succeed. No more coloured fonts. No more using script fonts for anything other than header. No more using blogskins — everyone else is using responsive templates be it the ones you can get for free or paid. Choosing responsive template is not even an option anymore, it's a must. You can get away with all this if you're a personal blog with no niche and you only post about your life, your family, your studies or if you're an established blogger with loyal readers but if you do have a niche or if you're only just starting out on blogging, then doing what I mentioned above won't get you far

Nowadays, design and content go hand in hand. You're attracting visitors to read your content with an aesthetically pleasing design and you're making them stay on your blog with engaging contents. Obviously you can do whatever you want with your blog and as long as you're satisfied, then why should you care about what anyone says, right

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