Someone from Squarespace has replied to this entry and clarified a few things. Please read A. Casalena’s comment here.
Squarespace.com, a very powerful blogging platform, caught my eye this week when they started advertising on some Revision3 shows. I signed up for the 14 day free trial to see what the hype is about. It didn’t take long for me to be blown away. However, there are some setbacks that would keep me from leaving Wordpress.
First Look & Pricing
I was eager to get busy testing Squarespace, but decided to look at their pricing first.
I’m honestly very disappointed with Squarespace’s plans, specifically the disk space offered. The cheapest plan, which will run you $7 per month, only offers you 1/2 GB disk space. To have 5GB of disk space you’ll be shelling out a whopping $45 per month.
Some other observations:
- If you want more than one editor posting to your blog, you’ll be paying a minimum of $17 per month.
- Allowing your readers to register isn’t possible on the low end plans. You’ll be paying a minimum of $45!
- Changing your template’s raw HTML is only available on the $17+ plans.
- You can’t use your domain with Squarespace unless you purchase the $12+ plans.
You can’t add a contact form unless you purchase a $25+ plan.
The features Squarespace claims to offer seem to be outstanding. The pricing, however, seems hard for them to justify.
Bottom Line: If you use Squarespace, count on hosting your images on a third party image host or sign up for Amazon S3. Otherwise, you’ll soon run out of disk space and possibly hit the bandwidth cap.
Wait! There’s More!
This post has been shortened because it’s pretty damn long. Please read the entire post and the comment from a Squarespace employee.
What’s Next?
After signing up for the free trial, Squarespace created a subdomain for my temporary blog. You can view it at enaresh.squarespace.com. Here’s a photo of my blog after signing in:
At the top right of the page, you’ll notice some icons. These only appear if you are the owner of the blog you are currently viewing. Here’s a brief description of what each icon does:
Switch To Content Editing
This icon enables “Content Editing” mode. This allows you to write new content, edit content, and delete old posts. Menu bars such as the one pictured below appear above all posts as well.
Switch To Structure Editing
This mode allows you to change some of the blog’s settings such as the title, header, navigation, pages, and footer. Here’s a few photos of this mode:
Switch To Style Editing
This part of Squarespace blew me away. You’re able to change your blog’s skin, fonts, CSS, icon set, and other visual aspects of your blog. Best of all, there’s no waiting for the settings to save - there’s a live preview at all times. I was blown away by how easy it is to change the style of text.
Preview Mode
The forth and final icon is nothing exciting. It simply allows you to view your blog as a normal reader would.
Bottom Line: The powerful javascript editing options are great for beginners yet still have advanced options for the experienced designer. I am in awe.
Writing A Blog Post
Content is king, right? Let’s see how well composing a blog post works on the Squarespace platform.
The WYSIWYG editor is superb in nearly every way. I’m currently using Wordpress and have had problems with the editor in the past and have switched to the HTML editor as a result. I didn’t experience any of these problems with Squarespace, but the post I composed was simple compared to posts I’ve written in the past.
However, I did run into some problems when trying to switch from the WYSIWYG editor to the HTML editor. I was expecting Squarespace to seamlessly switch over and save what I had written so far. Instead, FireFox opened a dialog box and the content was lost:
One thing I definitely like about Squarespace is that you can set a posts “Excerpt HTML”, which will show up in RSS feeds:
From Squarespace: The excerpt for this entry will be displayed when a condensed version of this entry should be presented. This can occur within your XML feeds or from within your main journal depending on which preferences you have set. You can easily set excerpts using the excerpt button from the text editor.
Like most blogging platforms you have the ability to disable comments, set tags, post in multiple categories, and have the post publish itself at a set date and time.
Bottom Line: The Squarespace editor is amazing. The amount of control you have over the text exceeds that of WordPress and is very close to that of word processors.
Overall
I am very pleased by Squarespace. The amount of control they give you over your content and style is excellent and is packaged in a very easy to use GUI. The experience is very intuitive and I noticed only a handful of glitches. However, the pricing and plans offered are sub par. I would be more likely to switch to Squarespace if they increased the disk space and packed more features into the cheaper plans.
Bottom Line:
Ease Of Use: 9/10 The helpful tooltips make the experience easy as cake. Delicious cake.
Features: 9/10 SquareSpace is a very powerful blogging engine. It’s extremely flexible and works nearly flawlessly
Cost: 4/10 $7 a month isn’t bad until you look at the features. The plans are horrible.
Stephen Groom Says:
6/10 for cost??? That’s very very expensive really, you are rating based on getting the better features for the budget price. Their prices are just downright crap..