Today’s guest poster is Jules from Everyday Mommy. She used to use SquareSpace, but has switched to WordPress. Here are her thoughts on SquareSpace.
Squarespace
is a very streamlined personal publishing platform. I say publishing platform because a Squarespace account will enable you to have much more than just a blog.
Squarespace offers many stylish and customizable templates to choose
from. They have three different price levels at $7/month,
$12/month, and $17/month. I loved my Squarespace blog and was able to
do lots of customization on
my own, without having to know tons of HTML. I left Squarespace only
because of price. As my traffic increased I repeatedly blew my
bandwidth and had to purchase more.
The Squarespace Pros:
- Adding, changing
or removing content pages can be done in a snap. You can set up additional pages for a business if you like. - Comment spam is almost unheard of.
- There
are an abundance of built-in stats with Squarespace, including the
number of RSS subscribers you have. You won’t need Site Meter any
more. - Annoying trolls? No problem. Just block their IP.
- Need storage? You get tons with Squarespace. You can host all your images and have plenty of room leftover.
- The
editor allows you to move back and forth from WYSIWYG
to HTML easily. - It’s easy to put your own domain in use with Squarespace.
- They offer a 30-day free trial so you can set up a blog and get used to it before you commit.
- Their customer service people are the best I’ve worked with.
The Squarespace Cons:
- It’s expensive.
- Squarespace
may be too complex for the self-proclaimed computer-phobics who are
uncomfortable even with a Blogger account. The Squarespace dashboard
can be rather intimidating. - No built-in search option (yet). They say that one is in the works.
I’ve been a Squarespace member since the summer of 2005.
It’s all in what you value. For me the cost ($17/mo) is worth having a site that is not just a blog. It’s a snap to setup a site (it can’t get much easier than this), has fabulous statistics, bandwidth and storage way beyond what I could ever use, and superb support.
They are always improving the product and I can’t remember the site ever being down except for a short period when they launched their last (and largest) update to the system. The enhancements are absolutely incredible. Someday Anthony C. (founder) is going to be rich and famous and we will be buying his stock.
They did increase prices with their latest release (V5) to ($8/mo, 14/mo, 20) but they grandfathered in existing customers so they are getting all these new enhancements for no extra cost.
Anyway I’m leaving this comment because someone is asking me about how to create a website and I’m sending them to this site to learn about the different systems so they can decide for themselves. I did not know anyone here had ever looked at SquareSpace, so I’m glad to see that you have. Now you have another perspective.
I encourage visitors take a look and sign up for the free trial as that is really the best way to evaluate the product.
Great review…I’ve used SquareSpace for a year and love it. The just-added search feature works well. It did take a while to figure everything out, but with the responsive customer service – who were always willing to answer my sometimes stupid questions – I picked it up pretty quickly.
Hey Guys,
Wow — thanks for all the positive comments 🙂 Two more (hopefully positive) things:
1) Full site search is coming out tonight (!), which will blow away search you’ve experienced (or not experienced) on other platforms.
2) Bandwidth was tripled across all plans last month — which was done to alleviate those bandwidth issues that plauged some of our more image-heavy users.
Jules nailed it!
Squarespace is amazing. I’ve been with Squarespace for seven months and in all that time, it’s never been down–not once!
If you maintain more than one blog like I do, you can house all your blogs in one spot. (well, maintain is a generous word, the dog blog has been rather neglected for the past few months. Rest assured, the dogs have not been neglected!)
I’ve set up a small business venture on mine and it’s been great. They promise more options for small business in the future, so
I hope that as my business grows, Squarespace will grow with me!
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