Visually Stunning & Easy to Use, But Has Some Drawbacks
February 26, 2016
Visually Stunning & Easy to Use, But Has Some Drawbacks
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace
I have helped small business owners develop their online presence using Squarespace. In particular, building a food/recipe site for a well-known chef who needed something professional looking while really emphasizing the imagery of the dishes he created. Squarespace is a visually stunning platform and did a great job showcasing the finished recipes.
Pros
- Visual representation - the way Squarespace showcases imagery is excellent.
- Flexibility - we were able to create unique pages as well as elements within pages that really showcased finished recipes.
- SEO - The system allowed us to craft dedicated title and description tags for each page to help boost the organic traffic to the site.
Cons
- Content Management - Trying to integrate fixed pages with a blog functionality, while maintaining a consistent look and feel, have been a challenge. The platform seems to do well as either a fixed site OR a blog site, but not one with mixed types of content.
- Creating a Master Template - It would be nice if Squarespace allowed you to maintain a master style sheet that could be applied to other pages on the site. We created a workaround by creating a blank, unpublished, page and simply duplicating it each time a new page was being created.
- Scheduling Content - Other platforms allow you to easily create and schedule content for publishing later, but either Squarespace doesn't have that functionality or I was not able to figure out how to use it.
- Before implementing and updating the site, it had very little traffic (less than 2%) coming from organic search, now nearly 30% of the traffic is generated organically.
- User traffic and engagement has increased dramatically because of the SEO implementation as well as the visual design which has brought many people into the site (and back again and again).
- The site has received many complements on the design, imagery and content.
- BigCommerce and WordPress
Squarespace is more visually appealing than the other platforms, but is not quite as well suited for large libraries of content. With some work on integrating blog-type pages and navigation into the overall template (with a similar visual style) this could easily be addressed. This may also be related to the specific theme used, which is great for the main pages and content but the blog design is not quite as well-suited.
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