[00:00:01.150]

Welcome.

[00:00:01.450]

Coffee powered systems equipping women with actionable steps to overcome overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I’m your host, Miranda Merten.

[00:00:17.610]

Welcome back to Tip Tuesday, where I gave you skinny on an app or a tool that could be useful for your personal productivity. Today’s tip is Show It, a drag and drop website builder. From their website, it says, Create a website that books the clients you love. Now, I stumbled on Show It sometime last year, and although I thought the websites were really pretty, I was really used to my WordPress websites. And if you have been around here long enough, you know that I use WordPress and an outside host, and I was not in the mood to switch anything up at that time. Also, if you’ve been around here long enough, you know that I don’t like Squarespace. So the term drag and drop builder was giving me a whole lot of Squares vibes, and so I decided to keep it moving and fast forward. A few months later, I was looking for someone to actually redo my website, and that’s how I came across Emma Troy designs, and she specialized in Show at sites, which obviously I did not have. So I took another look because I really loved her designs, and this time I was more intrigued and decided to give Shout a trial.

[00:01:33.070]

I think when Show It first came out, the concept was geared mostly towards photographers, wedding photographers, but I think it’s gaining a little more in popularity. But it still caters, I think, to more like the creative types. If you’re on my email list, I’ll be sending out an email later on with my experience, my before and after photos for my website. And what I like about Show It is that the designs are really pretty. And if you find a designer that sells templates, then there are some really creative ones out there, and you can end up with a website that’s super different from what you normally see for most drag and drop builders out there without having to hire an actual designer. Even if you can’t afford a designer or one of the pricey premium templates, the free templates that Show It provides on their website are actually still very good. They say drag and drop, but really you can drag and drop things anywhere. You’re not stuck to put things within a box. Like a lot of builders, you can customize each page separately however you want. So unlike the new Squarespace themes, where you have a set design for your colors, your fonts, you can actually change anything on any page.

[00:02:50.720]

So it’s similar to building on WordPress. But the thing that really made me want to switch is that I was tired of having to update and back up my site and worry about if I added a new plug in, if it would break the whole thing so I decided to give the trial a chance. It’s a 14 day trial. You don’t need a credit card. You can play around with everything, create a new site. Keep in mind there is a learning curve. So 14 days might not be long enough for you but if you send an email to their support saying that you need a little more time, they will actually give you a little more time. I think I ended up getting an extra two weeks. So it’s very generous with the time they give you to trial it out and then you can purchase when you are ready. If your trial runs out, your site still stays there until you’re ready to purchase. So you don’t need to freak out that you are waiting for a budget or waiting for something to come in before your trial runs out so it’ll still be there.

[00:03:45.420]

All you have to do is activate your purchase and then everything will be ready to be edited again. So the price for Show It includes your hosting price, includes all like they do all the updates and everything and the backups and everything saved for you. So that’s one of the things I really love is that you don’t have to worry about doing all the backups updating your plugins, wondering if your plugins are going to work with this version or if they’re going to break it. If you have a blog though, you do still blog on WordPress. So that concept was a little bit funky to me. It’s still kind of weird, but I’m used to it now. It wasn’t a deal breaker. So once you get used to how some of the things work with Show It, you kind of get over it pretty quickly. The learning Curve like I said, there is a bit of a learning curve and I’m still learning and discovering nuances about it. There are some things that I don’t like. For instance, the mobile and desktop are edited separately so if you change something after you build out the initial page, it’s not automatically responsive.

[00:04:54.730]

So you have to make sure that the mobile window also looks great if you’re changing it on the desktop side, which kind of works. It’s kind of like a double edged sword because if you want to get something done really quickly, you got to make sure you go to the other version and check out and make sure the pages still look good. But along that note, you can change the images or colors or font sizes or types on one like the mobile version and not have it affect the corresponding desktop version which is really cool. So if you wanted to use, say, a beach scene on the desktop but you wanted a forest scene on mobile because the picture just looks better, you can totally do that and then it would not affect the other side of it. There are a lot of features that I could go into, but I don’t want this to get super long, so I’ll write a blog post later this week with more details going into it. The pricing starts at $19 a month, billed annually. So that’s $228 a year if you don’t already have a blog or if you’re not using the blog portion.

[00:05:57.630]

And then if you do have a blog and you’re migrating from WordPress or Squarespace, the highest price, there are three tiers, so the highest price goes up to $408 annually or $34 a month. So the range is in line with about a good host, which will run you about $300 a year. So keep that in mind. And then if you want to check out my current site that’s built with Showit, you can go to MirandaMerten.com. That site currently that you see there is built with a Showit website. And if you want to grab a trial for Show it, you can go MirandaMerten.com/Showit and that will take you directly to their site. That is all I have for today. I will see you next time.

[00:06:44.790]

Thanks for listening. Coffee Powered Systems you can find find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the Show. Notes are on the website at mirandamerten.com. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with another bestie who would love it too and join me here next time.