Item: Squarespace
Rating: 8
Author: Tyler Newman

Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My organization uses Squarespace for a few tasks: purchasing website domains and developing websites for other companies. We have created multiple websites in a variety of industries using Squarespace. We use this to typically build smaller micro-sites rather than full-blown websites as we will normally want that to be developed on WordPress.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Domain Registration
Web Development
Album Storage
Domain Purchasing

Cons

Training user-base in making sure smaller businesses can be optimized for SEO.
AI Text generation for making content optimized for their site.
Video series that could train someone to be able to use the platform to make people who are regular business owners become web-savy

Return on Investment

Effective website development
Poor contact form management
Portfolio Management for Photography

Usability

Squarespace is so easy to use. Squarespace is something that my mom could use if she wanted to. But using the platform in a way that makes money and is best practice is a whole other animal. I would see trained web developers mostly using WordPress. This is designed so the everyman can be a web developer, and I think the platform should offer more education alongside AI tools to help people just use the site. Still, they should make them use the platform in a way that will educate them and produce better results if their schtick is working with inexperienced developers.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress and Wix

In my opinion, Squarespace beats Wix all day. We have used both for microsite development. We use WordPress for our main site as the featureset is open source and is considered the industry best practice. You can do a lot more specific features with WordPress that are sometimes possible on Squarespace, but you can really hone in something fully custom on WordPress or find an extra plugin that will help.

Key Insights

Do you think Squarespace delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Squarespace's feature set?

Yes

Did Squarespace live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Squarespace go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Squarespace again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Wix, WordPress, Constant Contact

Likelihood to Recommend

I would suggest Squarespace to anyone who owns a small business and wants to build a website. Squarespace is easy to use and edit. However, unless you are trained in best practices, oftentimes, sites will not get high organic rankings as the platform will not teach their customers best practices.

Squarespace Feature Ratings

Comments

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Great for first time web developers