Thoughts on moving to Squarespace
It’s been a couple of months now, and it’s probably time I wrote (and thought) about the biggest change to my web presence since I dropped WordPress for static site generator Jekyll: This website is now delivered through everyone’s favourite drag-and-drop, influencer romancing, podcast bothering web platform Squarespace.
At the beginning of the year, where one of my goals was to get on top of my neglected website, I could not have predicted this is where I would have ended up. If I were to write a list of requirements based on what I thought my needs were, Squarespace would be pretty far outside the shortlist of platforms. I’m a web standards victim, I like to have control over my own data, I like to tinker with the code, use open standards, retain control and (after an early evening glass of wine) write the occasional novelty 404 page that requires the deployment of my just-enough-knowledge-to-be-dangerous back end coding skills.
Squarespace: not the web platform I want…
Squarespace: packaging up the publishing, hosting and administration into a closed platform, restricting control over the inner workings, obscuring the code and limiting site design and architecture to a few very opinionated options, offers something that I didn’t know I needed, and trumps all my other needs – frictionless publishing.
…but the web platform I need
Every man has his price, and the price it took me to forget the importance I placed on my own personal website meeting the standards I expect in my professional work, such as miserly efficient payloads, compliance with web standards (whatever they are these days?), support of microformats and accessibility compliance? It turned out to be removing the friction that had long prevented me from actually publishing any blog posts, building out my portfolio of case studies or keeping my bio up to date.
So while in the past I had all those things, instead of it enabling me to work, it added enough friction, I’d look at the todo list of code issues to resolve, or new CSS features to tinker with, or the constant issues with my deployment pipeline and just… do nothing.
So here I am, after a 30 day trial just to see what the deal was, I’m now a paid up customer of Squarespace for the foreseeable future. Since moving to the platform I’ve posted deployed a full redesigned site, four blog posts, added four case studies, and a HTML CV. I’ve seen my visits to the site explode (publish it and they will come) and my interest in my own website as a digital presence (over and above social media, which surely, in its current incarnation, is on its death bed) is back. I’m logging in daily to tinker and edit and improve, because the platform is so good at removing the friction I was so proudly bogging myself down with (and wearing as a badge of honour, I hand wrote the HTML code to my whole site! Look at me!).
Squarespace is far, far from perfect; in places it’s irritating, with compromises everywhere, it’s expensive and I don’t yet have an exit strategy beyond manually extracting the content myself. For example:
I haven’t found a satisfying way to add an automated feed of my case studies to the homepage, so they get added as I publish them
I can’t add a standard author bio to blog posts, nor remove the confounding author name at the bottom of the template
I have no idea how (or even if) it’s compressing images, code or anything else to minimise the size of the site over the network
It offers extremely limited control over the small screen design, with little separation from the large screen design (this means the small screen version of my homepage is a mess, and I haven’t found a way to address it while retaining the design of the large screen version, it’s a good thing no-one looks at the homepage anyway :) ).
These are all things that were well within my control on my old site, some of them trivial to fix, but if I wasn’t posting to that site anyway then what’s the point?
How long this love affair with Squarespace lasts isn’t clear at the moment. While it’s new and novel, and driving me to write then it’s worth every penny. I’m reluctant to look too closely under the hood though, as I’m worried investigating any of the compromises might uncover some dealbreakers*
*if you know any keep them to yourselves please ;)