4 Things to Love About Sqaurespace
Squarespace Review: Elegantly Boxed In.
Do not get the wrong impression from the title. We highly recommend Squarespace for Entrepreneurs and Small Business. With that said, there is room for improvement that Squarespace can implement to make your elegant website not feel so boxed in.
Squarespace is a simple to use, yet powerful, website building tool. The most notable competitors on the market are Wordpress and Wix. This review will list out comparisons to the competitors, highlight on useful Squarespace functionality, and recommend upgrades to the user experience that hopefully Squarespace will implement to make the product better and easier to use.
Squarespace, Wix, and Wordpress are all do-it-yourself tools that allow you to build your own website. Squarespace, to us, is the clear leader for a functional website with some advanced integrations. Wix and Wordpress reviews below:
Wix: stay away. Wix was a free website building tool that, over the past several years, began advertising heavily to compete with Squarespace. While Wix claims to offer a similar web building to Squarespace, our experience proves otherwise. The major difference between Wix and Squarespace is price and function. Wix is cheaper and thus does not work as well. For example, our tech savvy friend decided to use Wix since it was less expensive. He built a site that was supposed to be automatically mobile friendly, like Squarespace. Lo and behold, you can only access his homepage on mobile. On desktop, website works fine. On mobile, you cannot access any page beyond the homepage. Needless to say, we have never experienced this problem with Squarespace. Cheap is cheap. You get what you pay for. Use Wix at your own risk.
Wordpress: invest time and money for a more adaptable and powerful platform. Wordpress has been around for a long time and is not going anywhere. Almost 30% of all websites use Wordpress - quite impressive! Wordpress has a number of integrations into 3rd party plugins, some of which are free, that can help power your site. There are a number of templates to choose from, some of which are also free, to help get your website started. Wordpress is quite adaptable, which is why a number of businesses use it. Similarly a number of agencies make their clients’ websites in Wordpress for that reason. The main differences here from Squarespace are that Wordpress takes a while to learn and the plugins are not all secure. Wordpress, from our experience, can be quite confusing to put together. Squarespace is a more contained environment which makes it much simpler to use. Plus with all of these different 3rd party plugins, there is quite a learning curve to determine which plugins are best to use. So if you have time, are tech savvy, and want to invest in a platform that allows for more adaptability, then get Wordpress. If you want good functionality and ease-of-use, get Squarespace.
Overview of Wix / Wordpress / Squarespace:
Wix - cheap and does not work as well as Squarespace.
Wordpress - more adaptable but takes time to learn.
Squarespace - good mix of functionality and ease-of-use.
The 4 things we like about Squarespace:
Variety of Templates
Ease-of-Use
Mobile Responsive
3rd Party Integrations
Variety of Templates
Squarespace offers a wide range of templates. Many of the templates are truly quite elegant and make for an excellent modern looking website. Templates are also broken out by a number of different industries to help you finetune your search for a site comparable to your business. They also provide a number of client examples to help you visualize how different companies use the same template. This is truly phenomenal when going through the creative brainstorming phase of developing your site. Disclaimer: Squarespace is not paying us to say these nice things, though we totally think they should!
Ease-of-Use
Depending on your familiarity with websites, content creation, and branding / marketing, you might incur a slight learning curve while getting started with Squarespace. But do not fear! It really is simple once you get the hang of it. Squarespace has a great collection of support articles to walk you through the various steps of getting your website compiled. And if you are unable to find what you are looking for, just send them an email. Their customer support team is quite good about getting back to you in a timely manner with the right answer.
For the more advanced users, Squarespace makes it easy to embed / inject HTML and CSS code throughout the site. Figure out what special features you want to include, go the page, drop the code in the box, and click save. Boom. That easy. No an advanced user? Do not worry about it. Squarespace has so much functionality that you probably will not need to inject code anyway.
Mobile Responsiveness
Squarespace makes it “hella” easy to have your website designed for mobile and tablet. As you are designing your website for desktop, it is automatically altering your website for mobile and tablet. You literally do not have to do anything, it just does it for you. What is nice too is that you can change the view mode within Squarespace so that you can see what your website will look like on mobile and tablet. You can make changes and edit from there to confirm that all the visuals are to your liking. And unlike our friend with Wix, we have never had a usage problem with our sites in mobile or table. Simply put, Squarespace works.
3rd Party Integrations
A key differentiator from Squarespace to Wordpress is that Squarespace has less 3rd party integrations than Wordpress. However, all Squarespace integrations are thoroughly vetted and tested before being made available for you to use. This creates a much more secure and reliable network of 3rd party integrations that work and make sense. Further, Squarespace has numerous articles that walk you through what those integrations are, how you could use them on your site, and how to integrate them. Wordpress does not independently verify each integration, thus there are redundant third party integrations where some work better than others. Also Wordpress does not have a library of information to help you determine which integrations are best to use.
3 Party Integrations available range from advanced calendars with Acuity, credit card merchants like Stripe and Square, sending email sign-ups to Mailchimp, sending completed user forms to Google Drive, pulling in your Twitter feed, creating an email with your domain name using Gmail, and much more. Quite powerful tools. And Squarespace continues to add to their integrations as new and relevant technologies emerge, making sure you have the tools you need for a competitive and modern website.
With all that gloating about Squarespace, where do we feel Boxed In?
We feel “boxed in” because some templates offer some functionality while other templates offer other functionality. There seems to be too much picking and choosing of very little elements that could easily be integrated into all of the templates. Now, there are options to put your Squarespace site in the developer section in which you can really customize the code… but we do not pretend to be programmers. We can edit some HTML, CSS, and Javascript here and there, but that is not our specialty.
Template Functionality Examples
Content sidebars and navigation sidebars: These create pretty nice features for blogs and extra navigation on sites. The problem is that this functionality is only available on certain templates. Why? All templates have blogs. Why can’t all blogs have content sidebars? The blogs are all relatively structured the same… Our advice is to research if you want a content sidebar and then choose a blog accordingly.
Blog as Stacked vs Grid: Not all templates allow you to have your blog posts shown as a grid. Again, why? Most blogs are structured similarly. Squarespace has already programmed this option. Just allow us to make our blogs stacked on every template!
Parallax / 3D Scrolling: Parallax and 3D Scrolling are newer features, so it might make sense why they are not available on all templates. However if you want parallax scrolling, you cannot have a content sidebar. Why?!
Formatting Twitter Cards: for some reason Squarespace blogs do not automatically show the blog thumbnail image as the full width of the Tweet. Instead, it shows a small square image with text to the right. You have to find the appropriate code to inject into your page, which is not the easiest to do. Here Squarespace should have that code injected on all templates so that the image cards come through nicely. Example of images below:
External article we linked to did not format properly.
Our article linked properly since we injected the proper code.
Auto-sizing blog images: If you stack your blog posts, users have an option for the image to auto adjust. This option makes our images look perfect. If you opt to have your posts displayed on a grid, you no longer have the auto adjust option. Why?! Now our posts are cut off and we have to resize…
Navigation bar options: how you place items in the top navigation bar depends on the template. We like having our phone number prominently displayed in case someone wants to call us. Certain templates do not allow you to have 3 sections on the navigation bar. Why you cannot just rearrange and add different sections on the navigation bar is beyond us. There are ways to inject code that can add in a phone number / different information, but we try to avoid that when possible.
Conclusion
All-in-all Squarespace is a powerful tool with great integrations that just works. However, there are a few functionality issues that definitely make us feel boxed in. While we highly recommend Squarespace, we also highly recommend you choose some of the features you want to have before fully committing to a template. If you pick a template and you’re not happy with it, Squarespace makes it quite easy to test out new templates - but that’s just extra time out of your day.
Do your research, choose wisely, and enjoy Squarespace!
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