Lord knows there are other options out there for running a website. But in one way or another, all the other options make it hard for you to take your business somewhere else. This is what people call “lock in.”
That means that if your hosting company or agency suddenly have policies you can’t live with or the rates are raised through the roof, there are inherent barriers to using some other service or system.
Even Ghost, an open source platform focused on newsletters, has barriers inhibiting your departure. There aren’t other Ghost providers, for one thing. You can run your own Ghost installation–and that’s a fantastic thing–but really now, do you know anything about running Ghost yourself?
With PeakZebra you are running on a highly curated installation of WordPress. We’ve configured and coded our sites so they are unlike anything else out there, but at the end of the day, you’re running on WordPress.
WordPress is the most widely used Content Management System in the world. It runs on over 43% of the websites on the internet (whether they are explicitly content-management sites or not). And there are a fantastic array of hosting company options for running a WordPress site if you decide to move for whatever reason. There are armies of designers and developers focusing on WordPress as well. You’ll never feel abandoned or alone–who doesn’t want that?
If you let your license with PeakZebra lapse, you’ll no longer have access to our tools and interface, but the setup is such that any reasonably skilled WordPress developer should have no trouble making further modifications. With PeakZebra, we have to continue earning your support because, ultimately, you’ve got other options.
You do, whether you put it in for yourself or we put it in for you, you own what you create. If you decide to use template copy or images that we’ve provided, you can use it both here and elsewhere, but you don’t own the copyright. For the most part, it’s open source material that anyone could, in theory, use. But again, what you create is yours entirely.
Most of the time, you can very easily change the content on your site by logging in as an administrator, finding the place you want to change, clicking on it, and making your changes in the popup window.
WordPress has its own page editor and there are plenty of things to like about it, but it’s another thing to learn how to use. We don’t especially encourage use of the editor, but we don’t prevent you from getting to it if you want to. It’s your site.
There are things that you can’t change using our simple front-end capabilities, and for those, there’s StudioQueue. There’s a flat-fee monthly fee of $300 that is charged in any month when you’ve opted to have access turned on (and you can pause it any time you like, so there’s no expense to you when you don’t have things you need us to change on your site).
With StudioQueue, you add your requests to our queueing system. We work through all the requests on the system in turn, generally handling a request within two business days of starting it. You can send as many requests as you like to the queue and we handled them one by one, taking care of as many as you submit or as we can fit into our generally two-day-or-less cadence till the end of the current month, at which point you can pause, or let the queue continue to process in the following month.
You can get an enormous amount of stuff done using StudioQueue and it’s a flat-out bargain compared to asking a traditional agency to handle it. Learn more about what you can get us to do for you.
Glad you asked. PeakZebra software is secure as long as the WordPress installation you’re running your site on is secure. PeakZebra does all the right things when it comes to verifying and cleaning up user input so that it can’t do malicious things. We do smart things to provide guardrails that keep you safe and sound.
Straight out of the box, WordPress is pretty darned secure. If you poke around the usual internet forums, you run across critics who say it’s got weak security, we won’t lie. But bear in mind that WordPress has an enormous footprint of sites on the web, many of which aren’t maintained over time and which aren’t up to date on their software. If you look at sites running the current version of WordPress, using well chosen plugins to add functionality, and kept up to date with plugin updates, you’re looking at great security with an excellent track record.