A client asked us this week if we work with Squarespace. The answer is yes, we certainly do! She also asked if we recommended it for her next website. Without a doubt, Squarespace offers a range of templates that are simple, beautiful, and modern. It also does a good job of anticipating performance on mobile devices. And the ability to drag and drop boxes to create your website is always an appealing idea. But we all know aesthetics and back-end ease of use are only part of the equation, and whether it’s the right choice as a platform for your website requires considerably more consideration. Squarespace can be a great solution if you know in advance that it can handle all the functionality you need. There are a number of caveats to keep in mind when picking Squarespace.
E-commerce and Squarespace
Don’t assume that Squarespace can do it, even if it seems like it’s a pretty simple thing. For example, you can’t use any old payment processor if using Squarespace for e-commerce: you have to use Squarespace. If you have a site where you are only selling one or a few items, you could theoretically create a button in PayPal and use the button code with Squarespace’s “embed code” blocks.
A Few More Squarespace Limitations
Here’s another scenario that you’d think would be fairly simple, but isn’t. Say you have a navigation bar in the header of your website (as you should). Now, say you want to have some dropdowns (a perfectly fine and normal solution to make your website content more navigable). This example from one of our clients, an art school in Dallas, shows an “Education” section on the nav bar. When you hover over it, you see options for “Adult Art Workshops,” “Teen Art Classes,” etc. Now, say you want the “Education” link on the nav bar to link to a page where you discuss your education offerings. Bzzzzt! You can’t. Squarespace just isn’t organized that way. We’re fairly sure we’re not the only people who’ve requested that functionality, though, and we submitted it as a feature request. Maybe more than once.
Another weird little thing is Squarespace’s email newsletter signup box. When you set it up, you have two options: to connect it to Mailchimp (a service we love and highly recommend), or you can set it up to connect to a spreadsheet on Google Drive. If you don’t use Mailchimp, that means that you need to periodically upload contacts from your spreadsheet to Constant Contact, or whatever other email newsletter service you’re using. You’ve got that right: you need to manually upload contacts whenever you get the chance. We’re not a big fan of repetitive, scheduled menial tasks, and again we’ve requested integration with other email newsletter services as a feature.
Formatting Content with Squarespace
We do love the drag and drop “boxes” used to build a Squarespace site. Most of the time they’re great and fairly intuitive to use—though organizing boxes horizontally takes a little practice, certainly. There are plenty of situations, though, where a client has wanted content arranged or styled aa particular way, and it wasn’t as simple as you might think. For example, what if you wanted a little box with a red line around it? Not too complicated, right? Well, there’s no “outline” styling option in Squarespace, so that has to be created with some custom CSS. It’s no big deal for us, but a non-coding user might find the process intimidating.
Similarly, there’s no option to change the color of text in the middle of a text block. Again, this fairly simple change requires a bit of custom CSS. If you’re a go-with-the-flow type, and you’re open to re-thinking the way your content is presented in order to work in the Squarespace framework… then Squarespace might very well be a good solution for you. If you want to build a website without limitations, then WordPress might be a more appropriate choice for you. We’ve written a blog post email newsletter signup box, if you want a side-by-side comparison of the costs and possibilities.
In short, make sure Squarespace can do what you need before you fall completely in love with a Squarespace template.
Here’s a list of Squarespace templates and a comparison of their various features. You can see that some templates have sidebars and some don’t; some of them allow you to use full-page-width images and some don’t; etc.
If you find a Squarespace template you like (and we do highly recommend setting up one of their websites with the free 30-day trial and experimenting with it), we can tell you if it can do what you want it to do… and if making it do what you want is easy or hard. Contact us for a consultation!
