New Website
So, why the hell would I decide that now is the appropriate time to get a new website off the ground, and go for the basic commerce version of Squarespace which is more expensive? Well, there are a few reasons:
I wanted to stop bothering my amazing brother-in-law who basically has to help hold my hand when I am doing any real editing to my website. Mark is fabulous, but with the old setup I was having to bother him anytime I needed to make a change larger than adding or removing a class from the listing. Formerly I had been using WordPress, a web hosting client, and a third party to hold ownership of the domain. So when things got sideways I would basically feel instantly over-my-head. However, on the upside I learned a lot about basic css and html and how to embed things on a website properly. But, this was one positive from the move. So now, theoretically, I can make the changes I need to make myself and somewhat faster.
Our web hosting client was not great. We always had issues with our old web client. They would randomly update their stuff and take the website down for hours (or days). They would neglect to update our SSL (security certificate) for our website so I would have to enlist Mark’s help to get that all handled. And generally they were not very customer focused.
I was worried about the fees being a little problematic with clients like Eventbrite etc.
I want to do some “back of napkin” math to show how this was somewhat an issue. So, generally speaking for stripe or paypal or whomever to do a digital transaction, we’re looking at 2.9% + a fee depending on the type of currency. We’ll look at USD for the sake of ease. This is 2.9% +$0.30 for the transaction. This means for a $100 online ticket, there will be about $3.20 in fees. For an in person 3 day class (which I was running before COVID-19 in Portland, OR) with a ticket price of $1300.00 the fee would be about $38.00. In general, for the two types of tickets I see myself running the most, the fees were 3.2% for the smaller ticket, and 2.9% for the larger value ticket.
That’s not too bad, but with Eventbrite, I was seeing some very different percentages. With Eventbrite, the $100 ticket for an online class had a $7.72 fee with it (representing a 7.7% fee) and the larger in person class had an $80.77 fee (representing about 6.2%). While I was passing this along to you all before (so I wasn’t having to pay it) it was something that you all were having to pay. So, not only did I want to take (newwebsitewhothis in all caps) control of my website, stop bothering my brother-in-law, and dump my old web client… I also wanted to start providing a permanent discount code by paying upfront, and stopping charging you for the fee. So essentially, my class prices will stay the same as they have been, but you won’t encounter the fee, and that fee has been greatly reduced.
Hopefully this all makes sense to you all. So, my goal is to remove barriers to you… and make things slightly cheaper. If you’ve read through the whole thing then you’re due to have another little discount code to sign up for some new classes. If you haven’t seen it yet, then it means you’ve skipped to the bottom instead of reading! It’s hidden in a parentheses somewhere above. It will get you $20 off. That being said, this discount is only good until 5/21/2020.
