If you’ve visited us before today, be advised that you’re looking at an entirely new Stephen Tiszenkel Consultancy website.
What’s that? You can’t tell the difference?
Well, there’s a very good reason for that: There is no difference — that you can see at first glance. Every single pixel of the site is identical to yesterday. Desktop, mobile–nothing’s changed at all. Except for this new post, the content is exactly the same, too.
So what happened, exactly?
Under the hood, a whole lot. The site is on a completely different server, owned by a new hosting company. And the version of WordPress, the content management system that serves you the site, has been upgraded. The process took hours, from researching the best hosts to the grunt work of the actual migration.
And yet you, the person for which this site is intended, can’t tell the difference. Then why did I do it?
The simple answer is that just because digital work isn’t instantly visible, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit users. The truth is my old hosting company — which, as a courtesy for the service they’ve given me over the years, I will not name — was not getting it done anymore. When I first started using them, they regularly appeared on lists of the best personal and small-business hosting companies. They’re still plugging away, but they’re never ranked on those lists anymore. Their technology is outmoded and slow; their service has slipped, too. I was so concerned about this that I decided to leave them even though I prepaid for two years of service just a few months ago. I’m eating more than a year and a half of hosting charges — but you know what? It’s worth it.
I couldn’t be happier with the new tiszenkel.com, which is much faster. And that benefits not just you, the user, it also benefits me, the owner. Search engines such as Google look kindly upon fast websites, and making changes to the site is a much more pleasant experience as well. For example: When I migrated all my images earlier today, it took perhaps 15 minutes to download them all from the old site. Adding them to the new one took seconds.
I tell you all this not just in the interest of sharing how I spent my day. I also want to let you know that there’s value in making changes under the hood to your digital properties. Too often websites are left to languish on old hardware, with old code. You’d be surprised at the huge, wealthy companies that let this happen, to say nothing of small businesses.
Today more people can get to this website more easily, and it’s a better experience when they do. That’s powerful. Even if it looks like nothing changed.