Good afternoon Life of Scoop. Thanks for your patience last week. Let’s jump right into this week’s big idea.

Your local newsletter needs a better website

When building Naptown Scoop, I focused 90% on the newsletter. The other 10% went to website and social media. That was a mistake.

Because until last week, we had a decent website on paper. Our domain authority was solid and it captured emails like nobody’s business. Just one problem.

It fell from the ugly tree and smacked every branch on the way down.

I built it on Webflow and didn’t change a thing in five years. Then beehiiv released its new site builder.

Now this might seem like an ad for beehiiv but I assure you, it’s not.

Inspired by KC Daily’s beehiiv website, I set out to revamp Naptown Scoop’s.

And here’s the result

You can click around yourself at naptownscoop.com

One page I’d always wanted to build was a partners page to show off our advertisers who spend above a certain level. After finishing I sent it to all of them with a note about how we appreciate their business and wanted to do something extra for them. The pictures link to their sites; backlinks are always nice. Even the billion dollar company, 84 Lumber, thanked me for that.

Now, here’s something I can say because beehiiv’s not paying me. The site builder is great. But it’s far from perfect. And I’m going to call out those limitations here. I’ve already submitted feature requests for them.

🐝 Limitation: I can’t link the full container that contains the picture, header, and paragraph. My workaround was to link the photo.

This is the second half of the home page. Time for another limitation.

🐝 Limitation: When displaying dynamic data (aka posts aka newsletters or blogs), it’s all or one content tag. There’s no way for me to have a page with all of our posts except newsletters. Workaround: each category has a tag that’s linked as you can see on the right side of the page. However, I get no control over the URLs of those tags so they’re ugly (https://www.naptownscoop.com/t/Local%20Guides%20%26%20Lists)

Here’s our archive page

🐝 Another limitation: There’s not a great way to display the recommended reading on the right side up there. You can manually select what you want there but you don’t want to have to do that all the time.

Now that all sounds pretty negative. So what do I like about beehiiv?

And aside from specific examples above, what do I wish was better?

There’s also always platform risk. The more we depend on beehiiv, the more power they have for price increases, deplatforming, etc.

Hire a freelancer to build your site - $

Find a web developer on Fiverr or Upwork, give them sites you’re inspired by and a site map for yours, and self-host.

Hire an agency to build your site - $$$

Rare Days does amazing work. Your city probably has several. Pay attention to the agency logos on the bottom of your favorite sites. Reach out to them.

For almost all local newsletter operators (myself included), simple website builders like beehiiv’s are good enough. You can even run ads super easily using something like Broadstreet.