Recently, I reviewed Squarespace and was quite intrigued by the potential Squarespace provided. As I mentioned, Squarespace is an all-in-one blogging platform and hosting solution that you can get for as low as $8 a month. What attracted me most to Squarespace is the simplicity and ability to modify every aspect of the theme. Squarespace provides the ability to change the number of sidebars and best of all the unmatched flexibility to change the width of both your sidebars and post section.
I worked several hours on my Squarespace site, bounching between many different designs and working to tweak the site to my liking. I was excited to change my posting area to 800px and stayed with one sidebar. I have to say the site was looking very nice. I was also quite impressed with customer support who answered the questions I opened a trouble ticket for within hours and sometimes minutes. I started with the $14 package, but then jumped up to the $18 package. $14 felt affordable for my little blog, but $18 started to sound a bit expensive.
Other factors that influenced this move back were the inability to easily inject code (such as AdSense) where I wanted to. I found myself injecting the AdSense code above posts or below posts, but adding the code within actual postings was a manual process. I manually added a few 300 x 250 AdSense squares in individual posts. Another frustration was the lack of widgets and that I’d have to upgrade to the next pay level to host my e-mail address. The killer for me was all the broken links I kept finding. Squarespace automatically redirects during the blog import process, but it didn’t work properly with all the links and I didn’t have one of those fancy WordPress plugins to find which links were broken.
I decided that WordPress has been working out fine for me, Bluehost has been affordable at approx $100 per year and WordPress has given me the flexibility to grab and use free plugins for any situation I want. Perhaps I’ll just research some new WordPress themes.
Squarespace is still an outstanding option and I found it easy to work with, but just decided in the end that it wasn’t for my site. Perhaps in the future, Squarespace will have a few upgrades that may bring me back. I’ll keep my eye on them. I do like what they’re doing and had fun with their platform.
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