Small Businesses Love Squarespace
January 25, 2016

Small Businesses Love Squarespace

Angela Skees | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace

Our company, which is made up of a family of companies, uses Squarespace for our each of main websites. These are the first place anyone would look for information on our products. They contain all our contact information, product and installation information, downloads, images, maps and galleries. It ensures that all possible information on our companies and products is easily accessible and always available, both for our customers and our sales force. We currently have 5 different Squarespace sites, one for each of our companies. They are all linked together in a manager account and are easily edited and updated by the site manager and those who have editing credentials.
  • Galleries - These are robust and clean. Able to be edited to suit your needs and configured to show off the high quality images companies produce.
  • Blogs - The blog feature is very developed. We do not utilize it in our companies, since we are less of a social product. But a good blog helps bring a personal feel directly to the consumers.
  • Site development - As a novice html user, I can easily edit and maintain our sites without the need for costly web developers.
  • Images - Though the gallery function is robust and able to be customized, I find that when placing images directly on to page layouts, that the software often resizes or moves the image to suit the template. I often wish I could specify the image size directly with pixel dimensions to ensure that it does not move or resize itself, which can cause lower resolution images to look blurry.
  • Sidebars - nearly all of Squarespace's current templates do NOT have the option for a sidebar included. This is something we love to use as it keeps the most current notices we wish to share visible on all pages without the need to edit every single page.
  • Folders and Indexing - Squarespace currently does have the ability to make dropdown menus by creating folders of pages. However, having a subfolder is not supported. Nor can you nest an Index, a collection of galleries or images, inside of a folder, which means that our products cannot be subdivided into their product folders. It just means we have to have a separate place for them, and our visitors to the site must look in two different places to get the complete information on some items.
  • Certainly increases our ability to service our customers.
  • As a newer company with a brand new products, a professional website is crucial to our brand and image. Squarespace allows us to have a quality site without huge overhead.
  • The ability to direct new customers directly to the site to resolve questions, aids in our sales team generating positive sales.
We have had a WordPress site in the past, but with the constant updates and my staff's limited knowledge of the platform, every time WordPress had an update our plugins would cause it to crash. The site was also not as easy to make changes to and the backend was less user friendly. We also looked into using a free Google Sites page for a time, for one of our simpler product lines, but without extensive html knowledge or a web developer, again, it was not as professional looking as we felt it needed to be.
Squarespace is more suited to simpler sites. If you need to have complex linked galleries and pages, it is not for you. However, if you are someone who considers yourself an artist, such as photographers, bloggers, painters, etc, you will find this perfect for your work. They also have great templates for selling items with Paypal.

Squarespace Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
10
Code quality / cleanliness
8
Admin section
9
Page templates
8
Library of website themes
6
Mobile optimization / responsive design
10
Publishing workflow
8
Form generator
8
Content taxonomy
6
SEO support
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
8
Community / comment management
8
API
7
Internationalization / multi-language
8
Role-based user permissions
10

Squarespace Support

Help is available directly from the back end and uses full sentence searching to find answers to questions others may have asked before. With a ton of articles and support questions documents, it is very likely that your question has been answered. If not each page has the ability to open a direct email to support. Each case has a number and can be followed. Responses are often quick and have links and directions clearly stated.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Quick Initial Response
None
No - The same support is available to all users of Squarespace, regardless of level of the site. As a smaller company, even though my sites have less than 15 pages, I do not need to upgrade to the Premium level of service to get full support like a larger company with more pages and users.
Recently I had four old sites in Squarespace 5. Squarespace has since upgraded to version 7. The very first site we ever made was for another company that we did consulting work for and since then they decided to take over their site management themselves. Unfortunately as the first site it was our main account for the three sites that followed. Support was very helpful to us in unlinking the four SS5 sites, allowing us to transfer ownership of the first site to our client. We were then able to maintain the other three as needed, as well as work on updating one into SS7. Each step of the process was helped and documented by support and made the scary process of switching ownership and billing for so many sites and easy process.