Overview
Few can say that it’s not tricky to make a good looking website, and quickly. It’s easy enough for the average user to start blogging, as it’s just about as simple as registering for an email account, and as intuitive as sending an email. But adding enough functionality so that your site looks professional, and having people take it seriously is another matter. Squarespace says it can do this for you, for a nominal monthly fee, of course.
The Claim
They say they have everything you need to build an amazing website. There aren’t many other claims, they don’t promise to help your website become popular, or help you to come up with a website idea. They basically keep it pretty simple, and let their software do the talking. Signing up for the free 2 week trial will give you everything you need to know to make the decision to keep on with it. Therefore, they don’t need to pitch you too hard on making a sale.
They do say that you can build a website or create a blog 10X faster on their comprehensive platform, but it is unclear how they are gauging this.
The Cost
There are different price points, depending on what you want your site to do, and what you’ll be using it for. If you go month to month, and just want a personal website it’s just $13.33 per month. They say the Advanced option is their most popular at $22.22 paid month to month, and their Business plan is $40 per month and includes all the bells and whistles.
The Commitment
Although they try to make their user interface as friendly as possible, it is still something new that you will have to get used to, and play around with a bit
Evaluation
Of course the biggest competition Squarespace has is with the plenty of free website and blogging systems out there, namely WordPress. With thousands of plugins, and a strong support system, as well as countless free themes that make a site look good, they’ve got their work cut out for them. Since they include hosting, they are also competing with hosting companies, like HostGator.
They definitely don’t lie, and you don’t need a credit card to get started. We had our test up and running in just a minute. It’s very similar to WordPress, but it functions more in a tutorial mode, with everything editable having a little edit link next to it so that you don’t have to figure out how to make changes, you can just change things as you go.
They also have checklists to help you get started, so you can simply follow their steps and you’ll have a basic website completed in no time. They also have built in statistics, so you can immediately see how many people are coming to your site. A lot of their features do function better than the standard plugins you get from the WordPress community, like their photo gallery, mobile apps, and social integration. They just look and run more smoothly, right out of the box.
When you take into consideration that this includes the hosting, it’s not too much a bad deal. You can think of it as getting a free website creation studio for the price of hosting, or free hosting included with your website management software.
Squarespace definitely works and delivers on their promises, the only question is whether or not it is worth the monthly price. It definitely represents some time savings, as you don’t have to search in vain trying to get your site to do the things you want it to do. And since you’re paying for their service, they’re obligated to provide
you with customer service, so you know you’ll get an answer to your problem from someone who knows, and it won’t be the blind leading the blind like it can sometimes be when using a free alternative.Our Recommendation
It’s hard to imagine someone setting up a personal blog with Squarespace, rather than using Blogger.com or WordPress.com. Perhaps a company might find it helpful to start their corporate site with Squarespace, but eventually you’ll want to have your own hosting, and be able to make changes to your site that Squarespace can’t accommodate.
If you are in a very creative industry, this may be a great service to promote your work, without having to get too technical, or spend time learning how to code, or how to tinker with plugins that don’t quite do what you want them too. If you are a photographer, or a videographer, you can probably make a really good looking site in no time with Squarespace.
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View Comments
squarespace is a cool idea, but they don't have image import/export capabilities, i had my photoblog there for a while, then had to leave and lost it all because i could only export text and comments back to wordpress... regardless, i was still thinking of going back, now i find out that i can't IMPORT my images into squarespace either, that it only links to them... so yeah, as lovely an idea as it is, i can't go with squarespace
I suppose those looking for a quick and dirty way in to having their own website would find SquareSpace a good product.
But i'm firmly in the Wordpress camp.
Once you've got to grips with the way it works (which really doesn't take long at all) then it's a great platform with almost nothing you can't do as it's got such a large community of developers making plugins and themes.