Simple, limited, but effective for small businesses
February 15, 2018
Simple, limited, but effective for small businesses
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace
We use Squarespace to host both of our business websites - our main organization website and also our professional programs website. As a small startup with limited resources, utilizing Squarespace has been critical to getting our message out to our clients and advertising our programs and offerings. We like Squarespace because it allowed us to build a clean, professional and visually appealing website without hiring an expensive developer. This is especially important to us as we constantly need to update information on our website as we grow and our program offerings change, and it would be really inconvenient to outsource. Once you learn the fundamentals of Squarespace, it is user friendly and easy to continue to update your own content without the help of a developer.
- Easy to create visually appealing designs using the gridded drag and drop and preset formatting options/ themes
- Maintains consistent design elements across your whole site - which you can change at a high level with one click and automatically updates globally
- Instantly updates content to your live site
- Great photo slideshow options and quotation box features
- The grid system can be limiting - even using the spacers, there are limited options when you lay out your website. Great for beginners, but not great if you want more complex designs
- Really hard to add site-wide custom code, including analytics tracking for advertising campaigns (Linkedin, Facebook etc)
- Design limitations on banners, blog posts, and other standardized functions
- Our website through Squarespace has been instrumental to building our membership and clientele, and sharing important information about our brand
- We have received clients through our website
- It is really difficult to search our website, and it is hard to figure out how to improve our SEO to get more organic outreach
Wix has a lot more flexibility than Squarespace in designing really original web content, with the same front end, no code style that Squarespace offers. If you want to do something really unique with your site, you can drag and drop something anywhere on the page, similar to a powerpoint presentation on Wix. Squarespace is gridded, so you can only drop things in certain places and it aligns the columns into halves, thirds, etc.
One thing I really prefer about Squarespace is that you can make global changes. While Wix is very flexible, if you decide to make a significant change (font, color, etc) you have to change it on every individual page in every place. On Squarespace, the global design choices keep your website consistent in font, color, and size across your site, so you don't end up with inconsistent text or color changes.
Another benefit is that you can add custom code or pull code for integrations with forms, databases etc, which you cannot do with Squarespace.
As a non professional designer, the clean format and limitations of Squarespace are actually useful in building a clean platform.
One thing I really prefer about Squarespace is that you can make global changes. While Wix is very flexible, if you decide to make a significant change (font, color, etc) you have to change it on every individual page in every place. On Squarespace, the global design choices keep your website consistent in font, color, and size across your site, so you don't end up with inconsistent text or color changes.
Another benefit is that you can add custom code or pull code for integrations with forms, databases etc, which you cannot do with Squarespace.
As a non professional designer, the clean format and limitations of Squarespace are actually useful in building a clean platform.