Welcome to KatelynBrooke.com!

Oh hey! Welcome to my new home.

It probably doesn’t look very different as I really just merged my two existing sites onto my new domain, but you’ll notice that for the first time ever my website and all my blog content are all on the same site!

How it went down

My mom used to read my blog pretty regularly, but now that we live together I guess she figures she knows enough about my life (which is fair, I guess.) But! I can still entice her with exclusive content photos of Griffin. One afternoon we were watching Griff do something adorable and it reminded me of a photo I’d posted on my blog- I asked her if she’d seen the photos on my blog, she said no, and turned to her iPad and started typing.

“Kate, it just says katelynbrooke.com is for sale.”

First of all, did you catch that? My own mom couldn’t remember my URL. Stab the blogger, why don’t you.

But secondly, say what?! The domain name that I’d coveted for a very long time was finally available. Expensive, but available.

I sat on it for a few weeks and then finally called the company listing it to see if I could get it for less than they were asking (which is a thing you can do, I recommend it!) The process was generally painless and actually turned out pretty funny.

When I was telling the guy about which domain I wanted to make an offer on, I heard him clicking away on his keyboard and then it got quiet.

“Wait, are you a street fighter?”

Huh? I laughed and said, no, that was the person who had previously owned it.

“Oh. That’s disappointing.” Sorry, dude. I like to think I’m scrappy, but I’d probably get my butt handed to me in an actual fight. Let’s be real.

But… why bother?

After I set up my blog and my website on separate domains, I started hearing (a lot) that having all your content online on the same URL was much better for SEO, and after a while I began to see that reflected in my stats. Considering my blog and my website weren’t unrelated anymore (an I actually designed them to look similar to one another) after a while it just really irked me that I was splitting my SEO, time, and efforts into two separate sites.

But most importantly, I was tired of having designs in my URL. Not because I’m going to stop designing, but I felt like it was extra letters that didn’t really give a helpful picture of what I do. Katelyn Brooke designs… what? I actually also do development, and collaboration is a big part of it too (but I go into that more here.)

Designs could mean any number of things, and for me I think this switch is stronger for my brand and leaves the door open for growth in the future.

The best part? Moving wound up not being as hard as I expected. My hosting guy, Aaron, (who I totally recommend, that’s my affiliate link!) was super helpful as always and walked me through the process. It took me longer than I expected (par for the course on personal projects like this) but I’m so happy to finally have it DONE!

 And speaking of personal projects, after a lot of thought I’ve decided to put aside Lettered Letters for now, for a variety of reasons. Believe it or not, I’ve actually had it on my to-do list this whole time, and it was only recently that I realized it’s not meant to be right now. I’m actually talking about that in Biz Nuggets next week, sign up if you want to read about it!

And now, a plea: if you see anything amiss over here, please, PLEASE tell me! I was a little rushed putting everything back in place over here and I’d love any feedback or heads up if you see something that’s not working correctly!