Life enjoyer since January 31th, 2014

While House Station Live v6 was released less than 3 months ago, we avorted this technology because of costs and limitations to look after a better solution. We gived a try to ghost: no submenu, no archives or calendar, only a tag clouds that looks like monstruously messy, and that costed me some angry messages to the support team.

Indeed, in addition to a €50 monthly charge for this limited technology, you can have a secondary tool to orrganize article… for €200 monthly plan. When I know that I struggle to pay bills more expensive than €30, that’s unacceptable for a simple blogging system. Their marketing is all about “being a alternative to wordpress” and “being cheap” with non-sense statistics, making them looks-like to be able to provide 200€ stuff for €25, while it’s in reality the opposite. The lack of template made me choosse one already used by 808 people around the word.

Plus, we are a media and Daily News logo was looking like C News, a major media from the same country, and I have friends who works at C News, so a very embarrassing situation. In only few weeks, I saw several YouTube thumbnails using exactly the same font and style. That’s probably one of the most generic ones on Internet libraries. being stuck to few generic tools like this was unacceptable and not professional. So in addition the the time spend to search and learn Ghost.org, we start over to found even better tools from 2023.

From the first time since our very beginnings, we managed to found a solution to upload our own fonts. This is absolutely incredible, cause we can finally looks unique online. We can also change all our scheme’s colors, in order to not make our website looking like “just another WordPress” with white background. So we returned to WordPress, but we left for the post edition being tedious, and came back with a “sub-engine” called “Elementor Pro”, and we were looking for specific templates made using that one engine only, cause post are much easier to edit rather than with the original WordPress method.

We tried to create our own theme from scratch, but Elementor Pro has limited possibilities, and we couldn’t create a better template than the one already existing on libraries. Quick tips, we looked for a theme was was updated within few months, using a homepage featuring a slideshow or several articles, the interface has to be clean and organized also, and the fonts used (even if we changed them) creative enough to not look too generik. We also looked after a documentation being available before purchasing, to see if it’s decently well documented, the number of available demos (which gives you a good clue about the care of details). we spent time looking the preview in every details to look for bugs. More importantly we’ve been looking the the care of design details, even if Elementor Pro don;t provide much possibility, few separators makes the global design more professional. of course the spirit was to be compatible with the project, and you always need to project your idea into the provided design. Most of solution was made as portfolio. Minimalist and gorgeous. Other was made for newspapers. But only the have chosen featured a Gaming Magazine template, which was the modern, creative and fun context we were looking after.

Here is how the template look-like on the online store “GamePlus” (link), from Jelly (link). It also features a 2 sections headers, which was important to separate our editorial section to our tools and services (store, schedules, charts, etc). before purchasing it, we made a new logo matching the theme style to make sure our brand also fits the design. And that’s it! Welcome to House Station Live… v7.1!! Will this one last longer than the previous? Seven could be our lucky number, as we were so regarding about all aspects. GoDaddy will provide secure hosting, and Elementor Pro the solution for both performances, organization and posts creation. Because all our ghost.org tool were using external solution (store, booking, schedule, statistics, votes), we simply had to move theses service to our new location, keeping the same categories structures, with more tools to organize, a more unique and original theme, many customizations tools, regarding even fonts and colors, and the most important, €9 monthly instead of €50.