Hell Yeah Team Squarespace

eDesign

Feb 8

I grabbed my laptop - gripped it hard by the sides of the monitor - and shook it like a madman. Then I punched it - a good hard uppercut, right in the motherboard. Finally, I set it on fire and threw it into a nearby fountain for good measure. OK, not really. But I really, really wanted to.

Back in the early days, I had a Geocities site. It was easy to understand - easy enough for a teenager to create a dumb, purple blog about what kind of things she liked and didn't like and who-did-what-to-whom in the cafeteria that day. After that, I moved on to Blogger - the site was equally awkward and clunky and narcissistic.

Then, as the Earth's crust cooled and dinosaurs started dying off by the dozen, it was no longer acceptable to have a dorky, unattractive blog

At that time, every pro had to use Wordpress. Wordpress had so many themes and plug ins and widgets and options - anyone could have a world class looking site on the cheap.

That is, unless you're like me and you don't have the je ne sais quoi that a beautiful WP site requires. I mean, I tried to DIY. Then I bought a nice blogsite theme that turned out to be a lot harder to customize than it looked. Then I hired a somewhat-expensive-but-shady-as-hell web designer (I'll tell you who if you email me), I gave up when they didn't deliver and tried to DIY again. It was around that time that I started having the violent fantasies about torturing my laptop.

And then I found Squarespace. (cue the angels-from-heaven harp music)

Squarespace's site says, "Whether you want to create a blog, eCommerce store, portfolio, or all of the above, you can express your idea with a website powered by our elegant yet intuitive platform." It sounded simple and perfect, but I was really skeptical - I've been fooled by charmers before

The beautiful part about this, though, is that Squarespace doesn't just show up with a bunch of flowers, tell you you're pretty and then disappear only to turn up making out with your cousin later like so many other companies. They let you TRY IT FOR FREE. And that little free trial is WAY more than enough time to see that you CAN build a polished site on your own.

Even better, they take care of all the hard, technical crap you have to do before even setting your site up. We're talking domain, hosting, email address - it's all in there.

AND you can easily create a store and sell products online - it only took me about five minutes to set up a product, connect to Stripe and be ready for business. People. Do you KNOW how long that took me with Wordpress?

Finally, Squarespace is inexpensive.

Not, like, Wix inexpensive (God help you if you decide to go with Wix. Cheap is as cheap does and Wix looks like the cheapest cheap of them all) but more like a small, affordable monthly payment you can cancel whenever you want inexpensive.

I know this sounds like a love letter to Squarespace; it basically is. It's a great tool to create a stylish site with minimal effort, and much like Wordpress, you can take that foundation and add more development if you're so inclined. If you do something wrong and get stuck, their customer service is awesome, too. I can't tell you how many times I've emailed them with an embarrassing question like, "I seem to have deleted all of the text on my pages and I'm sweating like a hooker in church. Please advise." and gotten the answer I needed to fix it the very same day.

The bottom line is this - Wordpress works. It's great. You can do a ton of stuff with it BUT you'll either have to be tech savvy enough to figure it out for yourself or willing to spend to have someone else do it. For those of you that fit into either one of those categories, you can totally rock Wordpress.

But for the rest of us? I say come on over to the Squarespace side. It's got everything you want in a pretty package. Also, we have cookies.

Got questions? Leave them in the comments. I'll try to help you out or point you to an appropriate resource. I'm not a Squarespace employee or affiliate, but I'll do my best to help you out.

Godspeed and Go Team Squarespace.

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