Why We Love Building Websites with Squarespace
There’s so much debate lately around which platform is the best for your website. Squarespace? Wix? WordPress? Shopify? Showit? It’s quite a loaded question because there are many different aspects to what makes a website function. There are many factors to consider: SEO, e-commerce options, ease of use, cost, etc. There’s also many options to choose from: Squarespace and Wordpress are two of the main platforms that you’ve probably heard of. While all of these platforms have their strengths, at The Look & The Feel, Squarespace is our platform of choice for a plethora of reasons. Today I’ll break down why we love using Squarespace over other platforms and how it can work for you!
Ease of use:
Squarespace’s user-friendly content management system design makes it easy for DIY-ers and business owners with little to no coding knowledge to build a website. The learning curve is very small compared to other platforms and it supports drag-and-drop and WYSIWYG (which is an acronym for “what you see is what you get”). If you are DIY-ing your site, you can simply pick from one of many Squarespace templates, and drag and drop your content and images in from there. While you won’t have many customization options without having any coding knowledge, you will be able to build a beautiful, user-friendly website without having a hire a professional. This can be such a big help when you are just starting out in your biz and desperately need an online presence, but the funds aren’t quite there to hire it out to a professional.
Responsive Design
When you are building a site in Squarespace, it’s automatically building a responsive site–without you having to do anything! If you are not familiar with the term responsive, it just means that your website is optimized for mobile phones and tablets. This is a great feature to have since mobile views of websites surpassed the number of desktop views of websites. While you can make any site responsive with other platforms, we prefer Squarespace’s built-in responsive design aspect. And as an added bonus–Squarespace allows you to make edits to your site on mobile if you’d like. You can also make it fully customizable, but you’ll need some coding knowledge to do so!
It’s all-inclusive
With Squarespace, your hosting, domain, and content can all be managed on your dashboard in Squarespace. You don’t have to maintain several different plug-ins or deal with hosting at one company, email at another, and your domain at even another company. Squarespace even has unlimited bandwidth and storage AND it’s secure (unlike Wordpress which is an open platform, therefore, it can be hacked and you’ll have constantly check to ensure it’s secure). Everything is simply right there when you log in for you to manage how you wish. Aside from updating your content and paying your bill, everything else with Squarespace is extremely low-maintenance. This is helpful for when we are done building a site with a client and transferring it over to them. With our clients, we often hear that they just want it “to be easy” when it comes to updating their site, blogging, or selling their product and with Squarespace, it’s just that. Our clients never have to deal with a huge learning curve, or incurring extra fees to have a web designer maintain their site once we are finished building it. On top of all that, it works as well. With Wordpress, your theme may update and it causes your site to break. Now you are spending hours searching through tutorials trying to figure out how to fix it, and who has time for that? With Squarespace, you’ll never have to worry about things breaking because of updates with plug-ins or themes.
Great Design
There’s a myth out there that Squarespace is restrictive or “not-customizable”, but that’s not true in the slightest. Of course, if you are a DIY-er who doesn’t know what HTML or CSS is, you won’t be able to fully customize your site aside from the edits built in. But with coding knowledge (which we have!) you can take any template and change it to fit your specific needs. What’s great about Squarespace’s design is that it has over 50 *free* templates that are all customizable to fit your brand. In the style editor, you’ll be able to choose your fonts, colors, icon styles, etc. So even without any web design knowledge, you can take a template that has a great design that you love, and plug in all your branding elements without any coding knowledge and your site will look like it’s been designed by a professional. Who wouldn’t love that?!
Customer Service
Squarespace’s customer service is top-notch. We can’t speak to all other platforms, but with Wordpress, there’s ton of videos and tutorials out there, but there’s no email or number you can call when you run into issues. With Squarespace, you can hop on their answers community and ask questions, and if you can’t get help there, they have an online chat option, and phone support that is almost always open. I’ll admit that I use the chat option quite often, and it’s always a real person, who is always able to help me identify my issue. If customer service is something that’s important to you, Squarespace is where it’s at.
Cost Effective
While Wordpress is initially free, most themes, plug-ins, and widgets are not, and you’ll be stuck paying for many different things here and there over time, which will add up. Squarespace is $12/mo for a personal site with a limited number of pages, and their business option is $18/mo. They give you an email at your domain (i.e. team@lookandfeelbranding) for free for the first year and it’s only $5/mo after that. Their plans also include a free domain. We love the transparency of their pricing model, and that we know what we will pay up front, and we know there won’t be any unexpected fees that come up while maintaining our websites.
All-in-all, you can get a great website out of any of the platforms out there. It just depends on your budget, time, and current knowledge. Squarespace has a very small learning curve, which means you can have a well-designed and beautiful site, but you won’t have to invest hours and hours of your time trying to learn how to use it. As a business owner, this can be a great benefit, since it allows you to focus on running your business, and not maintaining your website.
Do you use Squarespace? What are some things that you love about it? For some added inspiration, check out this article, “30 Gorgeous Sites using Squarespace as a content management system”
