Website or No Website?

I am seriously considering changing my website anthonyfontana.com, which uses wordpress, over to only using my Facebook artist page OR a Google+ page. My site gets around 2,200-2,500 unique visitors per year. Most of this traffic, unfortunately, is not to view my artwork but to find out who I am or to read a blog post I’ve written. But usually only one or two blog post per year get more than 100 viewers.

So here are the pro’s and cons to switching from a blog site to a social site:

• Pro: Better photo galleries. Facebook and G+ both have better photo galleries than WordPress.
• Pro: Easier to manage. I’m in Facebook a lot anyways and already have multiple pages that I manage there. And with Facebook, there’s an app for that.
• Con: No blog. Well no traditional blog anyway. I can still post longer textual posts as Notes on my Facebook and regularly on G+ pages.
• Con: No importing my old blog content to either platform; since neither is a traditional blog. Although, this might not be a bad thing. Fresh starts are nice.
• Con: I only have about 219 followers (Likes) on my Facebook artist/celebrity page and zero on my currently non-existent G+ fan page. Do I want to spend time to build that? How important is that function of the site? How important is building my brand as an artist, technologist, educator?
• Con: No custom URLs for posts. So something that gets hit a lot like anthonyfontana.com/bio won’t be as easy to find it it’s buried in a Facebook info panel.
• Pro: No more WordPress updates. Something inside me cringes that the whole site will break (there’s precedence for this) when I update WordPress.
• Con: Two Anthony Fontana pages on Facebook. One for me, the person, and one for me, the brand.
• Con: No ownership. No export. Although you can export everything from your Timeline and personal profile in Facebook I can’t find this option for brand pages.

Anybody doing this? Has anyone given up on their regular site just to use Facebook or G+? At this point I feel like I’ve talked myself out of this move. However, I might be willing to give it a try. Try: “do or do not, there is no try…” This type of strategy may need an all-in mentality and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I manage two other Squarespace.com websites and I thoroughly LOVE their interface. Another option to get away from WordPress would be to switch to a hosted solution there – which is more than what I pay right now.

A whole other post, but in general I love the look and feel of G+ much more than Facebook. Google has done a great job on the design of their social networking site. I’m sad to see that it’s not doing as well as hoped. I’d invest more in G+ if I had time or energy.