Interval
Welcome to Interval, a website that has been created to provide you with some great information on how to be successful in online marketing, making money from the Internet and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
There have been some changes around here lately. What was once a Wordpress multi-user site is now a fast-loading, simple static website that does not rely on a content management system database but on simple, flat HTML files that are easy to maintain, backup and store.
Why have I abandoned Wordpress when so many millions of users seem to be perfectly happy with the blogging platform?
I do believe I will tell you!
Static Website Advantages
There are many advantages to running a "static" website in preference to a CMS based blog for users who have more in-depth knowledge of HTML/CSS and are prepared to do a little extra pre-design work and template setup. Here they are:
- Very fast page-load time (an important Google ranking factor)
- Lightweight and portable
- No bloat (plugins, back-end server processing, database)
- No periodical software updates (Wordpress users know what I mean there)
- Simple, non-software-based backup availability
- More secure and far less prone to attacks by hackers
- Free from constant bot traffic trying to post comments/trackbacks
- Greatly reduced server load
- Greatly reduced bandwidth load
- Greatly reduced disk storage requirement
- I just like it better
I'll be honest with you. I got seriously fed up with the constant bot traffic relentlessly attempting to post comments and trackbacks to old blog posts. This activity really wastes a huge amount of server bandwidth.
That bandwidth should really be best used for human visitors who can become loyal readers and even buyers of products you may promote on your site. Bots are just a pain in the ass.
The other problem I wanted to walk away from was the constant Wordpress updates. Most of them were released to fix bugs in earlier updates and plug holes in security that an army of hackers around the world are hell-bent on trying to exploit.
My way of thinking on this is simple: No database to hack, no hackers!
Static pages are not completely immune from attacks, but instances are way lower than those of database attacks, simply because there are more ways of programmatically getting into a database when security is not water tight. And Wordpress security is never 100% or they wouldn't need to release so many updates so often.
Static Website Disdvantages
OK, just to be fair, I'm happy to admit there are some downsides to static sites. For starters, they take more work to set up and create new content for a website than does a CMS-based blog.
That's why they're not popular with the masses of website owners. It's just too easy to login to your Wordpress dashboard, click to create a new post and then just write it in the handy WYSIWYG editor where most everything (to do with HTML coding) is already done for you. Hit "PUBLISH" and you're done.
With a static site, at least with MY static sites, there is no user-friendly WYSIWYG editor and no "PUBLISH" button. Each new post needs to be created on a coded template page and HTML tags added manually.
That's what I'm doing right now, while writing this!
Easy HTML
In fact, I cheat a little to make the process easier and faster. I write my page in Word so it's all nice and spell-checked and readable first. Then I copy/paste it into the HTML page template I have open in my editor, Notepad++.
Most of the HTML is already in place above and below the text content, I just fill in the formatting tags by pasting line breaks and paragraph tags where needed and any italic or bold tags and ordered/unordered lists that I can create really fast using some hotkeys I customized myself.
Once the page is finished, I add an entry into a navigation page, which is just a list of the posts in a separate file. I include an entry in the XML sitemap too and then upload those files to the server via FTP using Filezilla.
The whole process doesn't take me much longer than it used to using Wordpress, to be honest.
Any "after" edits I need to do to the page are super easy. I simply open the file in Notepad++, make any changes and then upload in Filezilla.
There's no need for me to log into any dashboard, hunt through a long list of posts to find the one I want and then edit and re-publish it.
I like my way, because it's simpler for me and the rest is as above with regard to security, page load, server load etc.
OK, that's a lot of information for a website homepage, but since this is a big update and I need some fresh content for the new-look site, this is what you're getting for now!
Old Posts
I've preserved the old "posts" from the site's blog days and you can find them all listed at the foot of the page by clickable title.