Excellent, easy-to-learn tool for beautiful basic sites
January 18, 2019
Excellent, easy-to-learn tool for beautiful basic sites
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace
Squarespace is used by a handful of team members – I use it primarily to create websites for clients that do not have needs that require the building of a custom website. We offer website design as an add-on service in addition to our branding and identity design services; Squarespace makes it very easy to build out websites that match the identity's look and feel and also fulfill all the customer's requirements in a cost-effective way.
- Very robust how-to and troubleshooting guides – if you're trying to do something specific, a quick google search will lead you to a writeup by Squarespace of exactly the issue you're trying to solve. Comparing this to competitors where you're more or less on your own, Squarespace makes you feel confident that you can make any change you'd want.
- Well-designed template sites – you'd have to try very hard to create an ugly site when you've got such robust templates to work with. Plus design fundamentals like ample white space and color palettes are built in to the design process.
- Lots of options – Squarespace has beautifully-designed add-ons that clients ask for (such as adding a dynamic map to their site which shows their shop's location). These options require no jury-rigging and dovetail with the design of the site.
- Unbreakable web design – there is no way to break your site, unlike with competitors where you're trying to cobble together plug-ins to make your site function how you'd want it.
- Being able to save versions of a particular site's design. While I like that any change you make is automatically saved, it'd be nice to be able to show clients multiple versions of a site/page design or be able to revert to a previous design later on.
- The way that image galleries are handled can be a bit confusing. There's overlapping functionality between Gallery pages and image galleries inserted into a page, so I often find myself building out both to decide which works best.
- It'd be nice to have a more professional way to share beta versions of websites with clients – sending them a link to an automatically generated URL (like triangle-sphere-9.squarespace.com) and having them log in as a guest is sometimes confusing. If there were a way to have that login screen say something customizable (like "Welcome to the future home of Website.com!") it'd be helpful.
- Squarespace has allowed me to upsell clients from a rebrand to a rebrand + branded site, in some cases allowing me to double my revenue.
- My knowledge of Squarespace (and my ability to walk clients through managing their own sites after the launch) has allowed me to switch clients from other services such as WordPress. Becoming comfortable with Squarespace took less than a month.
- Squarespace's quick learning curve cuts down on trial and error and troubleshooting time, making my business more efficient.
I prefer Squarespace since they have already included many of the features that I had to use plugins for when designing with WordPress. Squarespace's many tools integrate seamlessly with the rest of the site's features, compared with a frustrating battle with my WordPress site's many incompatible plugins. Squarespace allows you to select any element that you're working on and immediately see all the settings that are affecting it, vs. going on a goose chase with WordPress to figure out what of the many many settings are causing a problem with the site.